As others have said it's so the user can place their own executables on the PATH
. Ubuntu supports this too, if you look in ~/.profile
you will find this snippet
# set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists
if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
fi
I believe the current convention is to use ~/.local/bin
for this purpose, and ~/bin
is an older convention.