Installing HACS in Lovelace can't find the Home Assistant folder containing the config file

I am very new to Home Assistant so please don’t dump on me if I don’t know how or where to ask or all the details needed.

I am running Home Assistant 0.108.9 Lovelace in an Oracle VM in a Linux mint host. (which I am also new to). I open Home Assistant by typing “homeassistant.local:8123” into my browser.
I want to install HACS but cannot find the Home Assistant directory containing the config directory. I’ve watch 15 youtube instructions and another lot of googled instructions but they all say “Unzip HACS into a custom_components folder in the Home Assistant directory containing the config file”. Well, I would love to but where do I find that? I see HACS on the integration options but…
All the videos and help suggestions are mostly about a Raspberry pi or something that bears no resemblance to what I am looking at.
I am not a programmer although I have done a tiny bit, but I’m not a Luddite either. Would someone out there be so kind to explain what I need to do?

First of all, how did you install Home Assistant ? Different installation methods result in different configuration paths.

If you installed Home Assistant Supervised, the config directory should be in /usr/share/hassio/homeassistant on the host.

The folder is probably hidden, so you need to unhide folders to find it (I think Ctrl+H will show/hide folders in Linux Mint)

This link may help with locating the folder (HA Configuration)

Thanks rob196.
I have the hidden files hidden, so they should show up. I looked at the HA CONFIGURATION link but couldn’t get anything there to work.

Hi Francisp
Thank you for the help.
There is nothing in the /usr/share folder named hassio or home_assistant
I didnt really install anything in the normal way. I installed the Oracle Virtual Box and set it up. And downloaded a VMDK file from Home Assistant, put the file as a disk (I’ve named it home_assistant_hd.vdi) in the VM and then the home-assistant shows up in the VM panel, double click on that and I’m off like a herd of turtles.
Inside Home Assistant I can see and edit the .yaml files in the file editor inside HA, but i have no idea where they are located or stored outside the interface, so I can add another folder in with them.