Windows has the same thing, it's just much less exposed, and none of the paths are magical, they're well defined and mostly adhered to for all major distros. Th

Windows has the same thing, it's just much less exposed, and none of the paths are magical, they're well defined and mostly adhered to for all major distros. The core of how it works in Linux is fairly straightforward. The main difference is in how additional software is handled. Windows, because of its history with mostly third party software being installed, generally installed applications into a folder and that folder contained the application... Mostly. Uninstalling was never as simple as that might imply. Linux distros had an existing filesystem layout (from Unix) to conform to, so when they started developing package managers, they had to support files all over the place, so they make sure packages include manifests. Want to know where use executable are? Check bin. Superuser.com executables? Check sbin (don't want those cluttering the available utils in the path of regular users). Libs for in libs. /bin and /usr/bin and the others are holdovers from the long past when disks were small, and recent distros often symlink usr to / so they're different in name only. /usr/local is for admin local modifications that are not handled through a package. /opt is for whatever, and often used for software installed into a contained folder, like in windows. Just know what bin, sbin, lib, opt and etc are for and most the rest is irrelevant as long as you know how to query the package manager for what files a package provides or as it what package a specific filer belongs to. If you looked I to windows and the various places it puts things I suspect you'd find it at least complicated, if not much more. Note: what I said may not match the LSB (which someone else usefully posted) perfectly, but for the most part it should work as a simple primer.