The orig­i­nal idea be­hind the or­gan­i­sa­tion of a *nix di­rec­to­ry hi­er­ar­chy is pret­ty neat. Every­thing is de­v­id­ed into log­i­cal sec­tions so it is pos­si­ble to use the least amount of space re­quired by reusing what­ev­er is pos­si­ble. Files that can be both used for i386 ar­chi­tec­tures and oth­er ar­chi­tec­tures like PPC and sparc are kept seper­ate­ly from ar­chi­tec­ture spe­cif­ic files, so if files are the same they don't have to be on the sys­tem twice. The sys­tem in this sense is a net­work where more than one ar­chi­tec­ture is used and all ar­chi­tec­tures can use the same files via a net­work, in such a way it's not even nesse­cary for in­di­vid­ual work­sta­tions to have a hard­disk.

All this was very nifty when disk­space was ex­pen­sive, but nowa­days it's not very handy to set up sys­tems like this when disk­space is cheap. So I bought a 160GB disk and no longer care about ef­fi­cient use of disk­space.