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Split-/usr on Linux became so broken, that even Gentoo maintainers decided they can't fix it
(gitweb.gentoo.org)
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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I'm curious why the separation between these still exists, because a bunch of distributions symlink all of these to
/usr/bineither wayThink about booting over network. Or having /usr on another drive. Including even network drive. Think about ~~dumb terminals~~(wrong cetury) thin clients. For example they can use small disk to quickly boot wihout downloading kernel and initramfs and use NFS for /usr and /home.
These days, AFAIK network boot is done thru initramfs. It loads rootfs in most cases I've seen tho.
True, network boot is not best example. Shared /usr is much better one. For example if you are school that wants to buy 100 thin clients for very cheap.
It exists because, long ago in a galaxy far far away, a sysadmin ran out of space on a drive. The system was split between two 10MB(?) drives, one was / and one was mounted at /usr, for User data. They moved some of the programs to a folder for a dummy user, /usr/bin, and put that in everybody's PATH.
Everybody kept on doing things that way ever since. Social momentum is funny that way.