It, uh, does. By virtue of the package which lists where the files are to be installed. There's no sense in fighting what is generally a well laid out system.

If you want to toss files all over your disk, then you might prefer Linux From Scratch.

If it can keep track of installation folders, what's the big deal with having the option of using custom installation folders?

It can... actually. But in it, you really gain really not much from it. Not speed, not anything really good nor bad will come of it.

Point is, you can easily move things around yourself if you want. You can even recompile any package you want, and have the files elsewhere by default. Its just that each Linux version/setup has a usually-decent installation organization, and having all programs conforming to a standard is a -good- thing: It means you can usually -find- the file you are looking for, instead of having to search for it.
On the other hand, the way Nokia set things up with the N900... Not quite as good. Thanks to most everything needing to be on the EXT3 secondary FS, most all programs get stuck in /opt/ (which is itself actually /home/opt), and there is quite a bit of symlinking going on.

Also, remember that Linux has no "registry", like windows does. You can generally run an application from wherever you want, provided its able to find its supporting files(And provided its marked as executable) - So, you could probably move whatever program you want to the MyDocs FS(I assume that's the only reason you're complaining), and either just launch it directly, or symlink the executable to the origional directory.
The only issue you'll have is that it won't delete properly if you try to uninstall it, but that's because you are screwing things up in the first place by moving them somewhere it's not expecting.

now you'll need to tell us why using custom installation folders would change anything in your use cases....

If offering the option of using a different folder was a common practice in the install process, needing to worry about whether a given program has been optified or not would be a thing of the past.

There you go...
http://www.theiia.org/intAuditor/ita...linux-systems/



Follow the trail and you will find answers to your questions, that is, insofar they haven't been answered yet.

B.T.W. Google is your friend...

Well, we shouldn't have to optify in the first place. It's a kludge that is unique to the N900 and thus not a justification.

Why we aren't expected to have the freedom of installing things just about anywhere we want?

OMG! Did someone just say this... The windows way is actually the one of the past. By not having order in your system you could cause all kinds of hell.

There is a script allowing you to have all of your rootfs in the 32gig memory. And if you like you could partition and make the 2gig opt/ space larger.