I'm pretty sure Debian (my Linux of choice) can boot without /usr. And I love how on that page they bring up BS such as "well Fedora has 450MB (of crap) in /, so that's not minimal". I've got at least one Debian box packed to the gills with programming languages, scientific software and who knows what else, and it clocks in at right around 129MB for /. Maybe Fedora is doing it wrong; wouldn't surprise me, as I switched from RH to Debian over a decade ago because of dependency hell.
I'm not sure linking /bin to /usr/bin is a good idea; it may have merits, but many of the reasons they bring up seem dubious ("Solaris is doing it!", yeah like Solaris should be the gold standard; "hard coded paths!" - recompile). I'm not opposed to progress, but some change isn't progress. It's interesting to me that this initiative is being pushed by Lennart Poettering - well known for his work on PulseAudio and systemd, two other controverisal Linux subsystems. While systemd is still unproven (and quite frankly, Poettering's talk at Linux Plumbers about systemd subsuming more control scared me; it's like a hydra!), PulseAudio appears to have finally become stable and usable. I guess time will tell with both systemd and /usr-merging.
Another interesting point from Poettering's talk was that he wanted to take more after BSD, especially having the one "correct" way to do it. Me, I like having options, especially in the case of "what if the 'correct' way doesn't work?" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4409768).
I'm not sure linking /bin to /usr/bin is a good idea; it may have merits, but many of the reasons they bring up seem dubious ("Solaris is doing it!", yeah like Solaris should be the gold standard; "hard coded paths!" - recompile). I'm not opposed to progress, but some change isn't progress. It's interesting to me that this initiative is being pushed by Lennart Poettering - well known for his work on PulseAudio and systemd, two other controverisal Linux subsystems. While systemd is still unproven (and quite frankly, Poettering's talk at Linux Plumbers about systemd subsuming more control scared me; it's like a hydra!), PulseAudio appears to have finally become stable and usable. I guess time will tell with both systemd and /usr-merging.
Another interesting point from Poettering's talk was that he wanted to take more after BSD, especially having the one "correct" way to do it. Me, I like having options, especially in the case of "what if the 'correct' way doesn't work?" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4409768).