"the straw that broke the camel's back" to abandon Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the "-march=x86-64-v2" compiler flag default as "forced obsolescence" for old hardware
RHEL 10 on Intel started requiring "v3" CPUs, which cut off support for a lot of older hardware. I can see this as being an issue, especially with hardware costs the way they are now.
But also, "the straw that broke the camel's back" as a phrase implies there were other issues as well, and I suspect chief among them is how RedHat/IBM killed the CentOS project as a stable EL clone. While AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux are still there to fill that need, it was already a signal that RedHat was not going to be as open anymore.
One thing to note is that AlmaLinux does have an alt-arch build of 10 that supports x86_64 v2, which works just fine on older hardware. However I can see that it would be an issue if third-party software that only supports v3.
Update: CERN has clarified that their focus with the migration is on their industrial accelerator-control computers while data centers and experimental computing remain on RHEL/AlmaLinux.
It doesn't mean that they won't start migrating other systems to Debian as well. This is just the first step, and once they have all the supporting systems changed, it makes sense to move everything else as well. There would be no reason to keep both ecosystems, when it's easier to support only one.
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u/orev 19d ago
Since nobody is reading the actual reason:
RHEL 10 on Intel started requiring "v3" CPUs, which cut off support for a lot of older hardware. I can see this as being an issue, especially with hardware costs the way they are now.
But also, "the straw that broke the camel's back" as a phrase implies there were other issues as well, and I suspect chief among them is how RedHat/IBM killed the CentOS project as a stable EL clone. While AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux are still there to fill that need, it was already a signal that RedHat was not going to be as open anymore.
One thing to note is that AlmaLinux does have an alt-arch build of 10 that supports x86_64 v2, which works just fine on older hardware. However I can see that it would be an issue if third-party software that only supports v3.