Scientific Linux 6.0 released [LWN.net]

Scientific Linux 6.0 released

Posted Mar 4, 2011 10:44 UTC (Fri) by malor (guest, #2973)
In reply to: Scientific Linux 6.0 released by lkundrak
Parent article: Scientific Linux 6.0 released

If you mean quality as 'stability', Debian is probably the best Linux distro going. They tend to be a little behind the curve, because they release slowly, but their releases are exceedingly solid. You typically need very few patches on the stable distro, even late in the 2-or-so year release cycle.

Now, there's lots of other reasons you might like Red Hat; if you have a lot invested in the RPM infrastructure, or if all your institutional expertise and code is in their filesystem layout and configuration, the pain of switching might not be worthwhile.

But it strikes me that you're doing an awful lot of work, each time you need to strip all the proprietary Red Hat bits out of their distro to distribute it freely. You wouldn't have to do any of that if you were based on Debian... just take the base OS, add whatever packages you want, and you're done. Further, if you get involved with the distro itself, you can probably get your preferred packages built right into the original archives, rather than having to maintain your own, separate infrastructure. I show twenty-eight thousand packages in their repos. In exchange for the help in tweaking what's already in there, I suspect they'd be happy to carry whatever extras you might need. Once you had the packages upstreamed, it'd become an issue of ongoing maintenance over the long release cycle, rather than a hurricane of work all of once.

Further, because your infrastructure should then be compatible, you should very easily be able to roll out Ubuntu on desktops, probably with the exact same packages, because Canonical will probably pick them up, too. I think the combination of Debian on servers, where stability is usually paramount, and Ubuntu on desktops (which gets an ongoing blizzard of updates, because they release whether it's ready or not), makes a heck of a lot of sense. Low maintenance burden on the really important stuff, higher burden on non-critical machines that need to be friendly. I just tried out the most recent Fedora, experimenting with using it as a KVM host, and was appalled at how poor the overall usability is in comparison with Ubuntu. It didn't last long on my test machine.

It just seems to me that the distro's entire focus would be much better suited to cooperating with the scientific community; their purpose is not to make money, but rather to make a great operating system, which strikes me as far more closely aligned with your goals than are Red Hat's. I'd argue, in fact, that this difference in focus would probably be more important to you, over the long term, than any theoretical benefits of RPM.

Just a thought.

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Scientific Linux 6.0 released

Posted Mar 4, 2011 12:59 UTC (Fri) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link] (3 responses)

> But it strikes me that you're doing an awful lot of work.

Not true, look at the release notes.

Red Hat splits most of proprietary artwork in separate packages which are easy to replace (you can pick unbranded replacements directly from Fedora if you wish). The changes they've done were rather minor -- look at the release notes.

The rest of your reply is sort of hard to argue with beyond what was already said, we'd be just repeating ourselves. For me (and trust me, I run ubuntu and debian as well, mostly to gain input about status and improvements done to them), I find el6 to be by far the best pick when it came to what I care about (sane configuration, ease of packaging, hardware support, stability and polish).

Scientific Linux 6.0 released

Posted Mar 4, 2011 13:05 UTC (Fri) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (2 responses)

Huh, from the CentOS threads, I thought it must be a pile of work. Is CentOS just dead on the vine?

Scientific Linux 6.0 released

Posted Mar 4, 2011 15:30 UTC (Fri) by ttrafford (guest, #15383) [Link] (1 responses)

The CentOS people have 5.6 to build first.

Scientific Linux 6.0 released

Posted Mar 4, 2011 16:18 UTC (Fri) by ESRI (guest, #52806) [Link]

SL also has 5.6. I think the two projects are actually fairly close schedule wise. SL has a smaller and different type of user base which isn't as prone to complaining like the CentOS user base is... and also, SL is honestly better at communication. Sharing a publicly available "rolling release" is part of just making everyone feel better that progress is being made (whether or not it's any faster or slower than CentOS's doesn't really matter).

Scientific Linux 6.0 released

Posted Mar 6, 2011 9:33 UTC (Sun) by Np237 (guest, #69585) [Link] (3 responses)

I dont understand the dichotomy you make between servers and desktops.

You need the same stability on (professional) desktops than you need on servers. Just because Ubuntu with its 6-month release cycle is popular among geeks, it doesnt make it suitable in a corporate environment. Windows doesnt change every 6 months, that is part of what makes its success in professional desktop usage.

Scientific Linux 6.0 released

Posted Mar 6, 2011 14:02 UTC (Sun) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (1 responses)

I think of that as the price to pay for the overall level of user-interface polish and easy usability of nearly all hardware. If your particular environment is as intolerant of change on desktops as on servers, and you also want a nicely polished desktop UI, I don't think there are any Linux distros that suit at all well.

Ubuntu LTS is probably the closest match, but with that set of requirements, I think you'd probably be better off just running Windows in most environments.

Scientific Linux 6.0 released

Posted Mar 6, 2011 16:43 UTC (Sun) by Np237 (guest, #69585) [Link]

Our experience with Debian is quite nice. It is only lacking on hardware support, which is the easiest of all these requirements to catch up with by ourselves.

Windows is a no-go in a scientific computing environment.

Scientific Linux 6.0 released

Posted Mar 7, 2011 16:57 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

You need the same stability on (professional) desktops than you need on servers. Just because Ubuntu with its 6-month release cycle is popular among geeks, it doesnt make it suitable in a corporate environment.

Yes, but you can get support on Debian and Ubuntu for longer than six months, and you don't have to upgrade when the next release comes out, although I have yet to be convinced that Ubuntu (or at least Kubuntu) can be trivially upgraded at the end of a long-term support release cycle to the next LTS version.

Windows doesnt change every 6 months, that is part of what makes its success in professional desktop usage.

This sounds like the argument about "old being good", which leaves users with ancient versions of popular desktop environments and having to manually install software from source because the distribution only packages ancient versions of applications. That's a solution which is only good for administrators who just want to push something out there and forget about it (and whether the users actually like it or not).

And yes, when I had to use Windows in a workplace, even being able to use a recent version was bad enough. So you can imagine how much fun it was to use an "old but good" version.