Abandoning Scientific Linux Was a Mistake

darkwi11ow

Scientific Linux was great! Sad to see the blog in its memory having so much llm-speak. I hope one day writing without llm will become a trend.

znpy

I didn’t comment much on this whole topic but what I wondered is: why not Rocky Linux? It’s quite literally the modern day CentOS

intoXbox

The benefits of SL described are pretty handwaivy to me. Having used a fork of scientific Linux, this was a huge pain because of outdated openSSL packages. Now you could argue this deserves being maintained separately, but I think it makes total sense to use the security- benefits of long term distros and only modify the parts required for reproducible scientific work. I was really glad when the vendor started unofficially supporting OpenSuse so I could finally use git on these distros.

etdznots

Sad that the author chose to generate slop instead of writing an article about SL

_joel

Well they could have used Debian from the start. I get why, but it's such a strange argument, the way it's posited.

tempay

I think the premise of this article is wrong. Scientific Linux was important once upon a time but these days with userspace containers there is no need for the same level of homogeneity. In practice everyone is using Apptainer on machines that don’t have a singular purpose.

forgotpwd16

Article quite a mess and, honestly, largely devoid of content. For starters, complains that SL should've continued because other community options might eventually be discontinued/change (as happened with CentOS). Like, duh. By this reasoning every effort should be duplicated to guard against the possibility that one option might disappear. In the end though all those RHEL rebuilds depend on Red Hat maintaining RHEL. The article never notes this and indirectly equalizes the effort and existence of a a genuinely independent community-driven distro (Debian, that CERN decided to move their accelerator-control computers) and RHEL rebuild (e.g., AlmaLinux, that CERN will keep the rest of infrastructure on, e.g. data centers, compute farms, etc). And here's the misguided part. If SL as still active it'll have been necessary to recompile numerous upstream RHEL source packages to remove the microarchitecture restrictions. This will've turned SL to entire new, independently maintained distro. The thing they wanted to avoid.

fergie

I read this article and was beginning to feel like it wasn't really going anywhere or making good arguments. Was disappointed, although in hindsight not surprised to find out that it was AI-slop. Stop upvoting AI-slop people!

avazhi

Maybe an interesting topic, but I won't be reading this because it's AI slop.

dist-epoch

> If one site builds against one version of glibc, another uses something slightly different The architecture problem that keeps on giving. It's amazing how much damage this one brain dead decision, to make it basically impossible to use different glibc versions on one instance, made to Linux. Containers in a way are another solution to this problem, even if they were created to solve a different one (optimal resource usage).

VCFundedGenYer

This LLM slop is borderline unreadable.

skybrian

Does it still matter now that we have Linux VMs and Docker files? Seems like OS on the actual hardware could be any Linux or even non-Linux.

temphaaa

just way way too much words to parse everythings... in general a lot of people wants a lot of things from the free time of the others but not doing anything about it. if you are using your tokens to write lengthy blog posts maybe spend them instead on trying to improve distros for LTS if that's what you want from SL.... Supporting old stuff, packages, kernel and hardware is really really a shitty and non rewarding job tho (been there done that), people only complains -- for example with length blog post -- and you don't get much rewards....

m4c-pl

Great text!