With /usr/local, though, you still have to use `sudo` - unless you're crazy and chown or chmod it appropriately. I've been a longtime advocate for $HOME/.local

With /usr/local, though, you still have to use `sudo` - unless you're crazy and chown or chmod it appropriately. I've been a longtime advocate for $HOME/.local, which is (a) obviously writable by you, (b) on your home partition, so it's backed up with all of your data, and (c) a common enough standard (see the XDG Base Directory Spec) that it's generally easy enough to get applications to use it. Just add $HOME/.local/bin to your $PATH and you're good to go.