[Yes, this post was written on April 1st and is not to be taken serious.]

The usability experts of Ubuntu have finally started to handle the single most mentioned usability issue with Linux: the top level directory names.

Quoting Finn C. Tional from the Ubuntu Usability Group:

It’s one of the mysteries of Unix that the directory named “usr” is not for user data, and the directory named “etc” while looking like random stuff thrown together stores all the important config files. […] This is probably the single most confusing hurdle for new Unix users. […] We need to finally tackle this, before people are too used to these odd directory names.

Therefore, they propose the following renaming scheme:

/bin      /system/executables
/boot     /system/boot
/dev      /system/devices
/etc      /system/config
/lib      /system/libraries
/home     /users
/media    /storage
/mnt      /storage
/proc     /system/processes
/root     /users/Administrator
/sbin     /system/executables/admin
/tmp      /system/temporary
/usr      /system/applications

They’ll include a patch for the GNU C library as well as for AppArmor to redirect the old path names to the new ones. Given the existing filename matching already done by AppArmor the overhead is expected to be neglible at least for AppArmor enabled systems. SELinux enabled systems will remain unchanged, since the user won’t be allowed to see anything potentially irritating in the root directory anyway, but will be confined to his user directory.

Since there are a dozen applications that will need changes to accomodate the new naming scheme, expect these changes only to be included with Ubuntu 10.4 (also lovingly named Ubuntu X) scheduled for April 2010.

Other distributions are expected to follow up with these changes in 2011.

P.S. Yeah, the Ubuntu folks really need to think this throuh some more. Russel pointed out that “My System” is even easier to understand; after all this is not about someone elses system or some systematic error or whatever. I figure he’s right. How about “My Computer” than this lowercase (pessimistic?) “system” directory they’re proposing there!