Arch Linux

XMinty77

Member

Registered: 2024-08-01

Posts: 2

Mounting library directories under the home directory

Hello!

I'm a very new Arch Linux user! I installed it recently on a fresh laptop and I'm very excited to try things out! The experience and community have been awesome so far :DD

I have a question that only a long term user of Linux would be able to answer, and since I'm running Arch I thought this would be a good place to ask. I hope I'm not wrong to think that, if I am I profusely I apologize D:

I am dual booting vanilla Arch Linux and Windows 11 using separate EFI system partitions (which my UEFI firmware supports excellently), and so I decided to create a shared NTFS partition that I put all my files in. Windows specific files and applications would go in the Windows partition, and the same goes for Linux, whilst other files go in the shared files partition. I have mounted this partition under /files for easy access.

However, applications on Linux often assume that the user is using the default library directories created by the system under the home directory, such as ~/Downloads and ~/Documents ...etc. But I would really like to instead have these directories in the common files partition.
So, my question is: Is it sane for me to create these directories in the common files partition and mount them under home? E.g. mount /files/Documents ~/Documents. And then put that in fstab of course.

I'm still not very familiar with the filesystem so I'm sorry if this question is a cinch, I'm figuring it out!

I also hope to be able to be a good addition to the community in the future <3 I'm loving Arch so far and I will be maining it as an OS for likely the entirety of my studies at college.
Thank you to everyone in advance!

P.S. Since this is a forum, I'd like to ask for additional advice out of scope of this specific question. I hope that's not too outrageous to ask either. I would massively appreciate any insights I should know if I'm using Arch. Thank you!

Awebb

Member

Registered: 2010-05-06

Posts: 6,688

Re: Mounting library directories under the home directory

Before shuffling moint points around, have a look at this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_user_directories

Also: symlinks.

XMinty77

Member

Registered: 2024-08-01

Posts: 2

Re: Mounting library directories under the home directory

Before shuffling moint points around, have a look at this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_user_directories

Also: symlinks.

Very good to know, thank you!