Hmm, I end up dealing with differences caused by this all the time. I'd say the biggest issue is that the one benefit I'm finally reaping, and apparently menti

Hmm, I end up dealing with differences caused by this all the time. I'd say the biggest issue is that the one benefit I'm finally reaping, and apparently mentioned (badly) at the time, is the one benefit that all the mentions of merging explicitly disavowed as impossible and that dinosaurs like me should go and Bury themselves. Namely, separate /usr partition made readonly. Serving readonly FS or shared FS for systems has been harder with unmerged /usr because of /etc (among others). However, the arguments for merging that I heard were "nobody does separate /usr anymore you dinosaur", "nobody wants to share filesystem between multiple system instances", and finally from the proposers themselves, "split / and /usr mean I have to keep track of where I'm putting files in RPM depending on whether they are early boot or not, boohoo". So recently I've been working on building a customised Gentoo, based on ChromeOS/CoreOS/Flatcar changes which tells emerge to use /usr as target... And for the first time in forever I have use for merged /usr and it's an use that was ridiculed when merged /usr was proposed (but use that was explicitly (ab)used by Solaris, btw)