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by IshKebab 3700 days ago
I wonder what is more likely in our lifetimes - a sane Linux filesystem layout, or viable fusion power. Honestly I'm not sure.
1 comments

gobolinux - http://gobolinux.org/ - has had a completely different filesystem layout, for many years. It's languished in the past few.

archlinux has for a couple of years symlinked /bin, /sbin, and /usr/sbin to /usr/bin, and /lib, /lib64 to /usr/lib https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/arch_filesystem_hierarc...

If you make your own linux distro from scratch, you can get many of the open source pieces of a linux distro to use whatever layout you want, while some pieces do require patching and fixing ... but you do have the source :)

The problem with Gobo is that this progression never works:

New FS Layout -> User Adoption -> Profit

Because at the end of the day the layout of the filesystem is never the selling point on any given distro. It always comes down to the software - either the amount of it, or the newness of it, and that is why people flock to Ubuntu and Arch respectively.

It is much more prudent to argue for filesystem improvements in those distros, and get them implemented there, than to fork it out. Gobo demonstrated both the validity and the utility of the approach, but it is up to distro makers to actually use the evidence given that the traditional Unix layout is garbage.

Much like Gobolinux, Guix also has a completely different filesystem layout. Packages are installed into their own namespace under /gnu/store but then linked to expected locations under a profile root (such as ~/.guix-profile).
Gobolinux still house the old layout for compatibility.

Heck, i think it could adopt any any FS layout it wanted as long as some defined place to house the "Programs" tree was provided.

re gobolinux

That's the one I was trying to think of! Yeah, they solved the directory problem. NixOS solved the packaging problem. Little projects doing what they can to fix the UNIX/Linux mess.