Re: how to set up 'no need for ability to handle multiple users on machine'

toby989@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
toby989@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Independent of that, what I was thinking is that if there is, and will be, only one user (apart from root) on the system, then there is no need to distinguish between multiple users, and a specific user folder is obsolete.

Then, from the mess that I saw over the years in windows, some (many) applications give a s**t about the personalized "My Documents" folders and store user documents somewhere on c:. I expect this ignorance be the same for suse.

It is not. This is not Windows. There's not a single program that will do that. Linux was designed like it is from the beginning. No program will ever ignore your home directory, because it was never possible to ignore it. Windows has its pre-NT history, with programs writing to global directories. So many programs still do that. Linux never had this, so no program ever did it simply because it wasn't possible to write to non-user writable directories.


On the other hand, where should data sit that I serve to the user on the system and potentially other users on the network. I guess my question is, where does for example MySQL store the data, under the "Documents" folder of my user?

No, in it's own directories. There's for example /usr/share/mysql and /var/lib/mysql. There's no reason to have the data in home directories.
Here is the contradiction. Above you said personal data cannot, should not, and is not stored anywhere else that the users' directories. And here you say that database data is stored outside of the users directory. Now I wonder where firefox will store my bookmarks and thunderbird my emails???
OK, found latter one in the hidden home directories. Still, it troubles me that you say that mysql would not store data in home directory.








But I see that I may need to switch to relative paths, away from my years-old way of having absolute paths (c:\project\project1\code).

~ is dead-easy to type. If you simply don't like it, just use absolute paths like before then; /home/toby/project1/code instead of ~/project1/code.

Word of advice: don't try to apply Windows habits to Linux. Use it the way it was meant to be used; under the hood, it's vastly different than Windows.
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