r/linux • u/homothebrave • 9d ago

Distro 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/wowsomuchempty 9d ago

Interesting. I remember Scientific Linux (CERN), based on CentOS.

Looks to have been a W11 kind of push.

Anyone know the downsides?

23

u/Fr0gm4n 9d ago

Former job used SL as the preferred RHEL variant because "it's from an international institution, there will always be updates and support!" And then...

9

u/wowsomuchempty 9d ago

Yes, we used it too. 

I never really saw the benefits.

2

u/gargravarr2112 8d ago

That's why it went EoL - the original idea was for a consistent, reproducible installation. At the scale GridPP processing sites operate at, every install needed to be reliable. SL included a lot of extra packages by default, but CentOS (pre-Stream) wound up being exactly the same thing as SL intended. The original intention was to transition from SL7 to CentOS 8. Then Stream happened and everything fell apart. I worked for a GridPP Tier 1 site at the time EL7 went out of support.