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Are there any current discussions about switch to a different standard directory hierarchy for Linux? The only thing I currently know of is GoboLinux, which looks quite outdated.

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    You should probably start at the workgroup on the fhs
    – Vincent Nivoliers
    Apr 5, 2013 at 17:23
  • And AFAIU the FHS is quite dead. It just falls far to short to be useful for GUI applications, and going any further would interfere too much with by now entrenched customs in distributions.
    – vonbrand
    Apr 5, 2013 at 19:04
  • afaik there is only fedora who things of moving everything into /usr and get rid of /lib /bin and /sbin
    – Bananguin
    Apr 5, 2013 at 21:33
  • @Bananguin Arch GNU/Linux has done this too.
    – strugee
    Nov 5, 2013 at 3:29
  • A related question is unix.stackexchange.com/q/567351/5132 .
    – JdeBP
    Jul 19, 2020 at 6:31

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I wouldn't say FHS is dead. The 3.0 version is documented to be still under development, although it is quite possible nobody is currently working on it.

FHS 2.0 is relatively well respected by most Gnu/Linux distributions, but ignored by other Unix like OSes.

I guess one of the reasons FHS 3 has some trouble being released is it is very difficult to reach a consensus between distro maintainers about what should be on the file system and where. Any change might break existing commands that expect files to be located somewhere.

That's probably why the POSIX standard is very light on that area, and only mandate a very limited number of files and directories to exist, / (hopefully), /tmp, /dev/tty, /dev/console and that's it. Even /bin, /usr/bin, /lib, and /usr/lib which were documented in earlier POSIX documents were dropped arguing specifying them was not useful.

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The Linux Foundation is responsible for maintaining the Linux Standards Base which refers to FHS as part of its standard. I have located a 3.0 standard draft You can follow their FHS Tag. I have no idea what's actually going on with this, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the recent developments have been caused by this.

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    anyone else find it strange that LSB is using bzr and not git...
    – xenoterracide
    Nov 5, 2013 at 8:26

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