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Level 0: The Computer, Explained
Lesson 7 · +10 XP

Where your stuff actually lives

Files live somewhere. But “somewhere” splits into a few different places, and people mash them together until something stops working. Quick tour.

Your home folder

Every account on a computer gets one folder that’s yours. Everything you save — documents, photos, downloads, settings — lives somewhere inside it.

It’s called your home folder. The path looks different per OS but the idea is identical:

Mac:     /Users/you
Linux:   /home/you
Windows: C:\Users\you

(Replace you with your actual username.)

When you open a terminal, you almost always start in your home folder. So when you see something like Documents/report.pdf in this course, it’s shorthand for /Users/you/Documents/report.pdf.

The folders you already know

Inside your home folder, your OS pre-creates a small set of folders. Same names everywhere:

  • Desktop — files that show up on your desktop background are files in this folder. That’s it. The desktop isn’t magic; it’s a folder.
  • Documents — the polite default for things you write or save.
  • Downloads — every file you’ve ever downloaded from the internet. Probably huge by now.
  • Pictures / Music / Movies — what they sound like.

Knowing these are just regular folders is liberating. You can navigate into Desktop from a terminal the same way you’d navigate into anything else.

The cloud trick

Here’s where people get tripped up. If you use iCloud Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive, some of your “files” aren’t actually on this computer.

They look like files. They appear in a folder. But the bytes live on a server somewhere, and your computer downloads them on demand. Sometimes there’s a local copy. Sometimes just a placeholder.

What this means for you:

  • A terminal command that tries to read a cloud file may have to wait while the file downloads.
  • A “synced” file you edit on this computer will (eventually) change on every other device.
  • If the cloud service is paused or signed out, those files may not be available at all.

You don’t need to do anything about this yet — just know that “the Documents folder” might be local, might be cloud, might be both, depending on how you’ve set things up.

The system stuff

Outside your home folder, the rest of the disk is your operating system and the apps it ships with. You generally don’t touch any of that, and the OS protects most of it. Folders like /System, /Library, /etc, C:\Windows — those are the computer’s stuff, not yours.

The terminal can see all of it, but for almost everything you’ll do, you’ll be working inside your home folder.

What’s next

One last lesson before Level 1: every computer has different conventions, but underneath they’re the same. A quick Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux tour so nothing in this course catches you off guard.