brent Don't we already have user & sys separation? What's new about this concept? My icons, themes, configs all exist in /home and in/root. Are they just saying that elevated privileges will be restricted for sys files?
Not everything supports per user configurations in a /home/$USER directory. Services like samba, ssh, mdlna etc you can not set per user configurations of the service, it makes no sense for this to be an option. The administrator controls the config in /etc/ that is you on your system but that is not how it works on other multi-user systems.
The problem is if system wide configurations are in /etc/ and default configurations shipped by the distribution which I think we can all agree are a good idea are in the same location what happens when the package is updated?
The config file is part of the package so it is going to overwrite it or the package manager must have added logic to prompt the user to make a decision about which configuration file should be authoritative and if the user choses the wrong one or like most computer users lose the ability to read when an error appears, they're in for a bad day.
Since those options suck we ship our "sane" defaults to /usr/share/defaults/* which users should not touch and leave /etc/ to the administrators of the system (For the most part, still 162 packages installing files here).
Samba is somewhat unique among other stateless configurations on Solus and has other benefits that allow Solus to ship sane, more secure defaults and combine it with user provided changes at the same time, but no one asked and I'm rambling so... moving on.
brent anything reckless you do in /root will be reset next rolling sync?
No. /root is the root users home directory a user that is disabled by default on Solus and most modern Linux distributions.
Contrary to popular beleif /usr/ does not stand for User it stands for Unix System Resources. If you want to be strict, users should not be messing with /usr/ - I don't follow this strict seperation of user and system space, its okay~ but you need to be careful. If in doubt and want to add something to /usr/bin/ that you have manually downloaded, add it to ~/.local/bin/ instead, that is actually all yours and will be added to $PATH when the directory exists.
