What is stored in the /home directory?

/home is the parent folder that holds each regular user's personal directory — /home/alice, /home/bob, and so on — where their files and settings live.

Each user owns one subdirectory under /home and, by default, can't write into anyone else's. This is the everyday face of Linux's multi-user design: your documents, your downloads, and your personal configuration are isolated from other accounts. Crucially, programs store per-user settings here as hidden dotfiles (e.g. .bashrc, .ssh/), so two users on the same machine can have totally different shells, aliases, and app preferences.

The tilde ~ is the shell's shortcut for "home":

cd ~            # go to your own home directory
cd ~/Documents  # go to Documents inside your home
ls ~alice       # ~name means that user's home, so this lists alice's home

Note: the root user is the exception — its home is /root, not /home/root. That's deliberate: /home may sit on a separate disk that fails to mount during recovery, and root must always have a working home directory to operate from.