Linux – Where does a program install on linux

You might want to read the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard; it's a useful reference.

Your home directory is where most of that should go. Pretend you're not the sysadmin; pretend you're yet another person with an account on the system. Within your home directory, e.g. /home/pufferfish, you can do whatever you want. /home/pufferfish/bin, /home/pufferfish/lib, and /home/pufferfish/src are all conventional choices, but none of it really matters.

For compiled programs, whichever directory/directories you use, make sure it/they is/are on the PATH so that you can actually run them without typing in the script or executable's entire path.

The distributions don't really differ much. I've found that the package manager on one might install binaries in /usr/bin, while some libraries may go elsewhere, and another system might install things in yet another place. I generally have to do some research to find where things go each time.

Most of the boot messages are put in a buffer, that you can access using the command dmesg. On most Linux distributions, that output is also stored in

/var/log/dmesg.log

That you can view with

tail -n 100 /var/log/dmesg.log