Hands-on Guide for Linux /home file and folders

  /home is a fairly standard concept, but it is clearly a site-specific
  filesystem. 
  
  Different people prefer to place user accounts in a variety of places. 
  This section describes only a suggested placement for user home
  directories; nevertheless we recommend that all FHS-compliant 
  distributions use this as the default location for home directories.
  On small systems, each user's directory is typically one of the many 
  subdirectories of /home such as /home/smith, /home/torvalds, 
  /home/operator, etc. On large systems (especially when the /home 
  directories are shared amongst many hosts using NFS) it is useful 
  to subdivide user home directories. Subdivision may be accomplished by
  using subdirectories such as /home/staff, /home/guests, /home/students,
  etc.
  
  The setup will differ from host to host. Therefore, no program
  should rely on this location.

  If you want to find out a user's home directory, you should use the 
  getpwent(3) library function rather than relying on /etc/passwd because 
  user information may be stored remotely using systems such as NIS.

  User specific configuration files for applications are stored in the
  user's home directory in a file that starts with the '.' character 
  (a "dot file"). If an application needs to create more than one dot
  file then they should be placed in a subdirectory with a name starting
  with a '.' character, (a "dot directory"). In this case the
  configuration files should not start with the '.' character.

  It is recommended that apart from autosave and lock files programs
  should refrain from creating non dot files or directories in a home
  directory without user intervention.