Where to install a 3rd party programs distributed as tar.xz or tar.gz

Solution 1:

Take a look at your $PATH for clues.

$ echo $PATH
/home/YOU/bin          -- Yes
/home/YOU/.local/bin   -- Yes
/usr/local/sbin        -- Yes
/usr/local/bin         -- Yes
/usr/sbin              -- Never (package manager)
/usr/bin               -- Never (package manager)
/sbin                  -- Never (package manager)
/bin                   -- Never (package manager)
/usr/games             -- Never (package manager)
/usr/local/games       -- Yes
/snap/bin              -- Never (package manager)

Now let's remove all those locations on your $PATH that are reserved for package-manger-only use:

/home/YOU/bin
/home/YOU/.local/bin
/usr/local/sbin
/usr/local/bin
/usr/local/games

So the best places to manually-install applications are in your /home and in /usr/local.

• Example: Were I installing Project Foo, I might create a new directory /usr/local/foo to contain safely all the Project Foo files. That would keep the files separate from my other Project Bar files (in /usr/local/bar) and Project Baz files (in /usr/local/baz)

That's not all the possible places. Lots of manually-installed services wind up in /var as well as /usr/local.