[LBo] Question re: partitioning

[Allen]

Back when I was running Redhat 7.3, all the the advice seemed to 
be to make a partition for boot, swap, and a few more like root, 
home, bin, sbin and var. Now almost all the advice seems to be to 
only have two partitions: swap and / with everything, var, home, 
sbin, bin, etc, all under the second partition.

Why the change? And does it impact performance?

Thanks,

Allen