2010/10/20 Stewart, Robert <Robert.Stewart@sig.com>:
They are definitely not the same. As I stated elsewhere, the user's home directory is equivalent to C:\ on a Windows system. The user shouldn't put "user-generated content" there. It should be in some subdirectory as preferred by the user, which you understood when you wrote "under" in the quoted sentence.
I completely disagree on "C:\". The ${HOME} is user-specific, while "C:\" is not. It is not uncommon to put documents (including textual) in different subdirectories under ${HOME}. For example, on my machine "lf ~" lists "examples" and "tasks" as different directories. To my mind, none of them entirely corresponds to "My Documents", but the whole ${HOME} does. Another argument: some desktop environments place an icon on the desktop, which opens ${HOME}. Along with "System" and "Trash" this looks very related to default Windows icons. Alexander Churanov