Finding a Successor to the FHS

Summary

Welcome to LWN.net The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free software communities. If you enjoy this article, please consider subscribing to LWN. Thank you for visiting LWN.net! By Joe BrockmeierAugust 15, 2025 The purpose of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) is to provide a specification for filesystem layout; it specifies the location for files and directories on a Linux system to simplify application development for multiple distributions. In its heyday it had some success at this, but the standard has been frozen in time since 2015, and much has changed since then. There is a slow-moving effort to revive the FHS and create a FHS 4.0, but a recent discussion among Fedora developers also raised the possibility of standardizing on the suggestions in systemd's file-hierarchy documentation, which has now been added to the Linux Userspace API (UAPI) Group's specifications. FSSTND to FHS 3.0 Efforts to standardize directory structure and file placement for Linux systems go back to the earliest days of distributions. The Filesystem Standard (FSSTND) 1.0 was released in 1994; it was developed as "a consensus effort of many Linux activists", and coordinated by Daniel Quinlan. In the preface to the document, which can be found in this directory, it noted that the "open and distributed process" of Linux created a need for a standardized structure of the filesystem: This will allow users, developers, and distributors to assemble parts of the system from various sources that will work together as smoothly as if they had been developed under a monolithic development process. It will also make general documentation less difficult, system administration more consistent, and development of second and third party packages easier. It was supplanted by the FHS 2.0 in 1997. Version 2.3, the last in the 2.x series, was announced in 2004. Eventually ...