> Also, I must be getting old, because in my mind systemd and Gnome 3 are still fresh controversies, not part of a “remember when” retrospective.
Yup! :-) In Debian, it was a decade ago (10 and 12 years respectively, in Jessie and Wheezy).
So you remember when /usr used to not be merged? Joking.
Friend, I remember doing horrible things to my config files to get XFree86 working. My first distro was Red Hat (not RHEL) 5. The /usr merge was last week.