Merge /bin and /sbin

Well, sbin is in the PATH of my normal user login. On my desktop system, I am both a normal user and the sysadmin -- and some executables in sbin are certainly useful without superuser privileges, and some probably even for non-admin tasks. That's why I think the distinction between bin and sbin is fuzzy in reality.

> this sounds potentially even more painful than merging /usr

When tinkering with a merged bin, the most annoying thing are duplicate names because of symlinks from bin to sbin and vice versa, e. g. sbin/ip links to bin/ip on my Debian machine, and both bin/lsmod and sbin/lsmod link to bin/kmod.

After resolving those by hand, I am able to rmdir /usr/sbin and symlink that to bin, without breaking anything. Of course, regular system updates may then break stuff in the same way as described in the article, and additionally by way of those duplicate entries overwriting each other.

Arch has merged bin & sbin, and it's fine. I'd wager that name clashes between bin & sbin happen much less often than name clashes in bin between different packages.