Frequently Asked Question

What is /home and where does the root user's home directory live?

/home is where ordinary user accounts have their personal directories, /home/alice, /home/bob, containing their documents, downloads, shell history, application settings (in hidden dotfiles like .bashrc, .config/, .local/share/), and the contents of their desktop session. The environment variable $HOME and the shell shortcut ~ both resolve to the current user's home. Many sites mount /home from an NFS server so that a user gets the same files on any machine they log into.

The root account is the exception: its home is /root, directly off the filesystem root. The reasoning is operational. /home is often a separate partition (or NFS mount, or LUKS-encrypted volume), and any of those can fail to come up at boot. If root's home lived under /home/root and /home was unavailable, the administrator would have no sensible place to land for the rescue session. Keeping /root on the root filesystem guarantees root always has a working home.