I have the unique pleasure of waiting as /usr is copied back to my Ubuntu SSD after offloading it to a sea of spinning rust to save some space. Surprise surprise Ubuntu keeps almost everything in /usr these days and it didnt boot :l but hey, at least BusyBox in initramfs has my back for times like these. Can i mount a specific ext4 directory with options? the issue seems to be my attempt at using a bind mount fails while running from the ramdisk, for whatever reason it wont mount my large data drive on /data
There was a movement to make /bin /sbin etc symlinks to /usr a few back. I honestly don’t remember the rationale, but here’s Debian’s page about the change: https://wiki.debian.org/UsrMerge. If I hadn’t been following the distros at the exact moment they did the changeover it probably would have thrown me for a loop too.
I think it had to do with the fact that these days relatively few people need /usr on a separate partiton and so it very rarely happens and something about system binaries being easier to manage if they’re actually all in one place. People are ready for some tweaks to the FHS, I guess.