But it is like that in Linux! When you compile a program you can almost always define the install directory. No problem.

Most linux Distro are built around FHS, and your distro's maintainers chose where to install the packages and when you are installing a pre-packaged binary, you're going by their rules.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesys...archy_Standard

Windows doesn't (really) have a well-defined filesystem layout, so stuff goes all over the place, PATH craziness, DLL hell, etc.

You can also symlink the files/directories to another place if you want to relocate it.