In most
commercial Unix systems, the
home directory of the root, or
superuser, account is the
/ directory -- the root of the
filesystem tree. In most
free Unix systems such as
*BSD and
GNU/Linux, however, the root user's
homedir is
/root. This can lead to a certain degree of
confusion in an installation where some systems are running (for instance)
Solaris and others
Linux or
BSD.
Though my opinion is certainly biased by my preference for Linux, I suggest that giving the superuser a distinct home directory is a good idea. The superuser, like any other account, accumulates dot files and other state. Placing this in a distinct directory makes it easier to back up, or to replicate from one system to another. More generally, files which belong to the system can be clearly separated from those which belong to the administrator.