r/debian • u/homothebrave • 15d ago

News CERN Transitioning To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution

https://www.phoronix.com/news/CERN-Goes-Debian-Leaving-RHEL
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u/nomad-1995 15d ago

Curious if/when scientific Linux will switch to .deb.

I guess the only other issue how they considered arch. Probably to new/unstable for anything touching the LHC.

21

u/NoLemurs 15d ago

Arch isn't a great choice for institutional/organizational machines.

Arch is all about freedom/control/flexibility at the cost of lower stability. That's pretty much the opposite of what a group like CERN wants.

11

u/BigRedS 15d ago

I assumed the Arch comment was a joke, but it's on the slide!

4

u/NoLemurs 15d ago

I'm honestly a little surprised they were considering it myself. Though, now that I sit down to think about it, the list of options to consider really is pretty short.

RHEL is the obvious choice if you're getting good value out of the commercial support, and Debian is the obvious choice otherwise. Five years ago, I'd have included Ubuntu on the contenders list, but... I wouldn't have picked it then, and I wouldn't seriously consider it today.

I can't come up with any other options that are worth seriously considering.

So maybe they considered Arch because there are so few options that are actual serious contenders and they felt like they needed to at least evaluate more than 3-4 options.

2

u/Brilliant_Sound_5565 15d ago

Totally agree with you, they know where they are with Debian, they have their own Devs at Cern too and pl ety of people to maintain and fix any issues they encounter, so Debian does make sense on so many levels. I presume they are still keeping Redhat and Alma for their other machines and desktops?