How about we stop mincing around and make some gut-wrenching modifications? As long as you're going to go through all the trouble of shuffling things around let

How about we stop mincing around and make some gut-wrenching modifications? As long as you're going to go through all the trouble of shuffling things around let's kill more than one bird at a time. Let's not worry about legacy needs, let's just worry about current needs. We no longer care about disk space and (for the most part) things can be tab-completed, so there's little reason to keep anything small if there's a down side. What's attractive about /usr? A lot of things, but mostly: single export-point, possible to separately mount (from a network, read only, whatever), logically nice to have all those directories not polluting /. I propose that / should contain the following directories: /cfg/ /home/ /local/ /mnt/ /system/ /tmp/ You would mv /boot /dev /bin /sbin /var /root /proc /sys /usr /lib /run /system, then mv /opt /local /etc/ is renamed /cfg/ just because I can and left in / because some things really are global configuration (and we can't be mounting /etc ro all the time). But don't stop there, because now /system/ is a mess. You obviously still can't treat /system as /usr because e.g. /dev is there, so put /dev, /proc and /sys under /system/kernel, because these things are figments of the kernel's imagination anyway. Under /system/boot/ throw in a directory for your bootloader, initrd and whatnot and one for any statically-linked binaries you have, if you have any (hey, it's optional). No need for a lib, because it's all static or in the initrd. Just because I'm a mean curmugeon who hates greybeards and love n00bs, let's mv /system/var /system/data. Inside /system/usr let's merge files from games, bin and sbin into bin and get rid of the empty directories. Then mv /system/usr/local/ /local/usr/. Speaking of /local/, it'd have two subdirs: /local/opt/ and /local/usr/. The former would contain an opt-style directory hierarchy and the latter would be like /system/usr, only with the purpose of the FHS /usr/local. Okay, so the /local/ stuff isn't to be found in an exported /system/usr/, but /local/ is just a fetish of mine. You could put it in /system/usr/, too. And yes, /system and part of its structure is required to be on / during boot. So sue me. Now you have: /cfg/ /home/ /local/ /local/usr/ /local/opt/ /mnt/ /system/ /system/data/ /system/boot/loader/ /system/boot/sbin/ /system/kernel/dev/ /system/kernel/proc/ /system/kernel/sys/ /system/root/ /system/run/ /system/usr/bin/ /system/usr/lib/ /system/usr/share/ /tmp/ Now you have a tree for homes, a tree for the whole system, which has a splits where you might need them for partitioning and exporting, a tree for configuration, which also has a name users can understand, a tree for non-packaged software, which allows for both crazy-opt style layout and traditional, and you have your global tmp and temporary mount point root. Did I leave anyone out?