[roger_]

Is there a mainstream distro that disregards all the legacy cruft? Gobo, but that’s not really mainstream.

Mac OS?

[wasting_time]

NixOS and Guix are fairly established in this regard.

macOS is certified Unix, and necessarily implements the "legacy" cruft.

[Imustaskforhelp]

I had written a similar comment here asking for people's opinion but I would like to add something that I know about which I didn't see in your list

Tinycorelinux

I know that it doesn't follow the best user practices etc. but I did find its tcz package format fascinating because they kind of work similar to mountable drives and I am not exactly sure but I am fairly certain that a modern package management system where two or more packages with conflicts etc. can run on the same system.

I really enjoyed the idea of gobolinux as well. I haven't played with that but it would be good if some more mainstream os could also implement it. Nix and Guix are more mainstream but they also require to learn a new language and I think that we might need something in the middle like gobo but perhaps more mainstream or adding more ideas / additions perhaps? I would love it if someone can tell me about some projects we are missing to talk about and what they add on the table etc.

I haven't tried Gobo though so I am not sure but I really wish more distros could add features like gobo, perhaps even having a gobofied debian/fedora eh?

[behnamoh]

at some point we gotta let go of legacy stuff tho, and Apple has shown in the past that they're not afraid of doing that.

[rendaw]

It was partial, but IIRC Arch Linux made the switch to get rid of at least some of the directories previously: https://archlinux.org/news/binaries-move-to-usrbin-requiring...

Edit: Oh haha, this article was posted 13 years ago and there was a similar thread which is how I dug up that link... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5944594

[loeg]

I think most of them have started simplifying somewhat (/bin vs /usr/bin): https://systemd.io/THE_CASE_FOR_THE_USR_MERGE/

(FWIW, Fedora 17 was released in 2012.)

[em500]

macOS has all of that (mostly inherited from NeXTSTEP which was significantly based on 4.3/4.4BSD). It's hidden by default in the GUI, visible in Terminal.

Nowadays most end users just use /usr/local or /opt/local or whatever is managed by Homebrew or Macports.

[olowe]

Plan 9 is definitely not mainstream but readers of your comment's replies may find it interesting when looking into Unix/Linux cruft.

[dev_l1x_be]

Not really. I wish we had a new OS based on the Linux kernel - the legacy (shared files, r/w mounted OS, etc). I think Google's Fuchsia has some interesting ideas.