The way I see it the whole /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/sbin and home and /var and /home/bin and friends come from the fact Unix was time s

The way I see it the whole /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/sbin and home and /var and /home/bin and friends come from the fact Unix was time shared some eons ago and designed to run on mainframe/clusters with different part of the OS living in different rooms and that carried over to Linux somehow and it made sense to map directories like that but nowadays it feels weird because we are running Debian or CentOS or BSD or whatever on a single computer that could live in the hive of a mainframe but will not. And a binary will run if the x flag is set so everything just works in the end (most of the time). Most of us are users, not sysadmin (even though reading the man page you'd think you should be one to run any distro). It's like X. It's designed and battle tested to be ran through a network but most Ubuntu users won't ever need to know it or do it. My pet peeve of mine is dotfiles used as configuration files. It means I can't have a clean home folder since data, ~/bin and settings(.) are all mixed up. I should be able to install apache in ~/bin and use .apache/ to configure it. Maybe have 3 homes ? One for each purpose (data, binaries and settings). Sigh, I suppose more intelligent people than me have thought very hard about that and it'd be a pain to implement. But frankly this is cosmetic comparing to the systemd and wayland/mir topic. Reminds me of http://sta.li/filesystem http://sta.li/filesystem Filesystem This is a editable proposal for a filesystem layout that will fit the changed principles of the OS. /bin - all executables /boot - all boot files /dev - devices /etc - system configuration /home - user directories /root - the root home /var - spool, run, log, cache /share - man pages, locales, dependencies /devel - development environment /devel/include /devel/lib /devel/src Based on the Linux assumption: /sys - sys files /proc - proc files For old style emulation: /emul - chroot for packages that are too infected Don't know if that project is still alive though.