A New Folder Just Appeared In Your Home Directory

So if you're a Linux user, you may have noticed that there is a new folder in your home directory. If you go into a file manager, let me open up my file manager and go into my home directory here. If I scroll down, I have your standard music, downloads, document, desktop, all of that, templates, videos, all of these get created when you create a user on a Linux system. They create these default home directory folders, but there is a new one that wasn't here that long ago. It is called projects. Now, what is projects? Well, right now it's just an empty directory because I haven't put anything in it, but projects is designed to be a projects folder. A lot of times what that will be is that will be things like, for example, some of your software projects, your programming, scripting projects. So this article from It's False, and I'll link to the article in the show description, explains why this change was made, why you're getting this extra folder. But the purpose of this folder is to give you a place to put project files. So those are gonna be things for your coding projects or maybe 3D printing projects or CAD projects. Now, why was this needed? It's because obviously when it comes to Linux, our community and most of the people that run Linux as a desktop computer, a lot of us do a lot of scripting and programming. We have these project type files on our system. Even people like me, I'm not necessarily a programmer or developer. I don't call myself a developer, but I got a ton of GitLab repos, dozens. I have various little software projects that I play around with. And sometimes it's hard to figure out where to put that stuff. For me, I have a folder that I just call GitLab, home directory slash GitLab. Or some people will have home directory slash GitHub or slash repos slash dev slash code. Or some people were actually making a projects directory themselves, but now you actually have a projects directory that will be there out of the gate anytime you create a user. For those of you using a rolling release distro like an Arch Linux or in my case, CacheOS, you probably already have this projects folder now appearing on your system. And if you're on a distribution that has made this change and maybe you have no need for the projects directory, you're not a developer, you don't have CAD projects, 3D printing projects, you just have no use for this projects folder and you'd just like for it to go away, just delete the folder. It was created the one time and it won't be created again. So just delete it and no harm, no foul. You'll never see that projects directory again, except the next time you create a new user on the system, they'll have the default set of folders. And again, any of the default folders that get created, if you don't necessarily want them or need them, you don't necessarily have to keep them. You can delete the projects directory or the templates directories. Another one I never really use. I know a lot of people do use it. There's a lot of things on the system. For example, pictures, there's a pictures directory. I never use that thing. For me, the only pictures I ever deal with because I'm not a photographer, I take screenshots of my desktop, but I create a separate directory for that. I call screenshots. A lot of times I just delete my pictures directory. But again, that's just me. You do you. Now, one reason why you might not wanna just go ahead and delete that projects directory, even if you're not necessarily going to use it, is because it is these standardized directories. Applications kind of expect them to be there. There will be applications that maybe will use them, even if you don't necessarily manually go put stuff in it. Sometimes other tools may wanna use this new projects directory. It's possible, for example, that a backup tool or a synchronization service might treat the projects directory as a meaningful category of data. So just, again, I recommend it. Hey, if you don't wanna delete it, you're certainly free to do that. But there's no reason to do that unless just empty directories on your system just really make you mad. And I know some people are really anal retentive when it comes to empty directories, empty files on their system. They just want all the clutter off their system. But that empty projects directory is not going to hurt you. One other interesting thing about this is this was an 11-year-old request. So there was a request to create this directory back in 2014 and it's just now being created in 2026. So, you know, this is sometimes how long these commits, you know, these new commits in a project sometimes, you know, they take a while to percolate, right? To get discussed, to get fleshed out a little bit before they finally pull the trigger on it. But for me, I think this is a good idea because before people were just putting, you know, their GitHub and GitLab projects all over the system. And now there's one directory where all of that stuff should go. And I'm going to start using it. And I think maybe you should too. Peace guys.