In the windows environment you will have .m2 folder in C:\Users\user_name location and you will copy your settings.xml file to it in order to setup your proxy settings and nexus repository locations and etc.
So What I have to done on Ubuntu environment to get similar setup after installing maven on it.
As per Where is Maven Installed on Ubuntu it will first create your settings.xml on /usr/share/maven2/, then you can copy to your home folder as jens mentioned
$ cp /usr/share/maven3/conf/settings.xml ~/.m2/settings.xml