> From what I understand, the main disadvantage is that if your root
> filesystem gets unrecoverably corrupted, and you've dumped everything
> into it, you lose everything. For a typical single-user Linux
> installation, are there other disadvantages that I'm not thinking of?
Dividing things among multiple partitions may make system upgrades or
reinstallations easier. No need to save the contents of /home and
/usr/local (or whatever your custom, 'interesting' directories are) and
copy them back; simply destroy and re-create the other partitions.
Admittedly, that's not a very strong reason, but it might be a slight
convenience depending on how often you upgrade or reinstall Linux. On a
personal, single-user system, it doesn't matter much.
Shawn