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I've read quite a number of discussions about people wanting to merge /bin and /sbin into /usr/bin. The same cannot be said for doing it the other way around.

Is there any technical reason why one would not want to merge /usr/bin and /usr/sbin into /bin, or is it mainly a personal preference/design choice?

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possible duplicate of /usr/bin vs /usr/local/bin on Linux –  jasonwryan 2 days ago
    
I'm well aware of what they're used for. I'm really more interested in why people (I think Fedora did that) chose to merge everything into /usr/bin rather than the other way around. Obviously, it's not really necessary to follow the original intention of /bin and /sbin anymore. At least not on the desktop. I was going to design my own, Debian based distro and this is something I have been pondering with. Just seems more elegant to me to have all applications in /bin. –  user237251 2 days ago
    
I think Fedora did that Fedora symlinked /bin, /lib, /lib64 and /sbin to /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /usr/lib64 and /usr/sbin. /bin and /sbin are still separate. –  Dennis 2 days ago
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The reason that things were merged to /usr and not to / are noted in The Case for the /usr Merge:

Myth #11: Instead of merging / into /usr it would make a lot more sense to merge /usr into /.

Fact: This would make the separation between vendor-supplied OS resources and machine-specific even worse, thus making OS snapshots and network/container sharing of it much harder and non-atomic, and clutter the root file system with a multitude of new directories.

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up vote 2 down vote

You are correct, Fedora is the avante garde of this, although freedesktop.org, an independent body, then took up the cause in hope of encouraging it pan-linux.

According to this, the merge follows a pattern started by Solaris, the "primary commercial Unix implementation". It is interesting in the sense that the original Unix used /bin, and so getting rid of the split might have meant making the directories in /usr symlinks instead of the other way around.

However, considering that option, linking the toplevels is probably more straight forward and obvious.

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