Ubuntu – How to install software into the home partition

Well, you could just add this line to your ~/.profile¹:

HOME=/user/home/

However, that really isn't a good idea. Problems it would cause include (but are probably not limited to):

1. That will only work if /home/user is owned by your user. If it isn't, you won't even be able to log in.

2. This will work for your user only. For everyone else, your home directory will be whatever is stored in /etc/passwd. This means that, for example, cd ~user will fail. In other words, if I log in as bob and bob has the line HOME=/home/bob/foo in ~/.profile, then bob thinks that his home directory is /home/bob/foo but nobody else knows that:

    $ whoami
    bob
    $ echo $HOME
    /home/bob/foo
    $ cd ## this moves to your $HOME
    $ pwd
    /home/bob/foo
   

So far so good. But:

    $ whoami
    terdon
    $ cd ~bob
    $ pwd
    /home/bob

3. This will drive your sysadmin insane. You do not want to anger your sysadmin for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

In any case, it is rarely a good idea to mess with variables like $HOME, as it can often have unintended consequences. Instead, a much cleaner solution would be to make sure every new shell session starts in the target directory. Just add this line to your ~/.bashrc:

cd /user/home/

Now, each time you log² in or open a terminal, you will find yourself in /user/home.

¹ _{Or ~/.bash_profile if it exists.}

² Log in to Debian-based systems like Ubuntu, anyway. For other distributions/OSs, you might need to add it to ~/.profile as well.See here.

The /snap-directory contains a file named README:

This directory presents installed snap packages.

It has the following structure:

/snap/bin                   - Symlinks to snap applications.
/snap/<snapname>/<revision> - Mountpoint for snap content.
/snap/<snapname>/current    - Symlink to current revision, if enabled.

DISK SPACE USAGE

The disk space consumed by the content under this directory is
minimal as the real snap content never leaves the .snap file.
Snaps are *mounted* rather than unpacked.

For further details please visit
https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/the-snap-directory/2817

To sum it up, this directory contains the mount-points for your snaps and several symlinks which are needed by snapd.

The directory /home/<username>/snap holds the configuration files for your snaps.