Mental illness really isn ' t funny . <| sep |> Best of luck to you ! I look forward to the post from you that says you got it ! <| sep |> It is simpler , because it ' s wrong , the wrong solution is often simpler . The problem is that you cannot share the same root filesystem between different architectures . Currently lib is architecture dependent whereas usrshare in theory contains only architectureneutral data . But bin has no such distinction . By splitting bin into arch $ ARCHexec and statexec you gain that and you can share the same root filesystem between multiple different architectures . symlinks don ' t do the same thing as confexecpaths at all . It replaces PATH with a more flexible approach , the current way of PATH includes an entire directory into your searchpath , the granularity is only directorylevel . This approach makes the granularity executablelevel .