Well in a lot of new distributions /bin, /sbin and /usr/sbin are symlinks to /usr/bin. The historical difference is that in /sbin there are binaries meant to b

Well in a lot of new distributions /bin, /sbin and /usr/sbin are symlinks to /usr/bin. The historical difference is that in /sbin there are binaries meant to be executed by root, and thus they were not be put in the path of non root users (Debian still do that), so you don't get binaries that you can't run in your path (these days it's stupid since you may want to use sudo and thus have them in path only for the shell autocomplete to work properly). By the way I prefer how things are nowadays, otherwise you get the same confusion that I have every time I use Windows or macOS that you either have an infinite PATH variable or have to specify the full path every time. Yes, the package manager can make symlinks, but at that point what is the difference? Also having everything in /usr/bin has the good side effect of avoiding that by mistakes someone creates a program that has the same name of one of the thousands of programs that are in the repository of a distribution, to avoid confusion to the user that can launch a program or another depending on who comes first in the path.