zlacker

> Like this very article, there were plenty saying "the /usr split is there for a reason!". No, it's just an historical quirk.

For those of us who ran small-disk NFS workstations back in the day having the split and a common /usr was no quirk and very useful. (There were also diskless (Sun, OpenFirmware netbooting) workstations: common /bin, /usr, but per-machine /var on the NFS server.)

The article states:

> Cheap retail hard drives passed the 100 megabyte mark around 1990, and partition resizing software showed up somewhere around there (partition magic 3.0 shipped in 1997).

Yeah, except if you have a fleet of several hundred or thousand workstations to provision. "Cheap" is relative, especially if you're an academic institution.

>>throw0+(OP)
Even if a split was pragmatically warranted, the fact that the user directory was chosen is without a doubt a quirk, an accident of circumstance that has since been perpetuated out of tradition (or less charitably: cargo cult mentality.)