Simpler structure practical?

Posted Aug 18, 2025 14:10 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Simpler structure practical? by nekomachi-touge
Parent article: Finding a successor to the FHS

Adding to grawity's comment (which covers most of it), I'd also note that you want the root to be simple enough that you can have a read-only ramfs root on top of which you mount the "real" filesystems.

That way, in a failure situation, you can work on the filesystems individually (either from the initramfs, or by moving a drive to another system), until you can mount all of them once again. Additionally, because /home and /usr are separate mount points, you know that you can mount a live USB stick's /usr over the system's /usr without breaking things or affecting user data, either for repair work, or to let you do urgent other work before you come back to repairs.

You end up wanting a set of paths that can be entirely recovered from distro packages (/boot, /usr, /bin), a set for kernel data (/sys, /proc), a set for configuration (/etc - which in an ideal world is just local overrides, and can be empty), a set for local system data that should not be blindly deleted (/home, /var, /opt), and a set for non-persistent data (/run, /tmp).