Abstract:
CERN introduced the change at last weekend’s MiniDebConf conference in Winterthur, Switzerland. The speaker said that the main reason for abandoning RHEL and switching to Debian is that RHEL adopts the "-march=x86-64-v2" compiler flag by default. This setup means that some older hardware will no longer be supported and may be obsolete.
However, the migration process has not been smooth sailing. CERN said that they encountered a number of challenges when switching to Debian, including the lack of standardized tools for automatically building and publishing software packages, and insufficient official tool support. In addition, some tools do not support the coexistence of multiple versions, which also brings difficulties to CERN's software maintenance work.
CERN plans to migrate more than 2,200 industrial computers and embedded systems to Debian 13 by the end of this year. Once the migration is complete, the devices will receive long-term support and are expected to receive updates and maintenance until 2030. CERN also reiterated to Phoronix that data centers and experimental computing environments will continue to use RHEL or AlmaLinux.
Debian is a Linux distribution known for its stability and is widely used in personal computers, organizations, and servers. Ubuntu is currently one of the largest Linux distributions, and its basis is Debian; Linux Mint is developed based on Ubuntu. Ubuntu and Linux Mint are generally more tuned for new users than Debian, making them easier to get started with. However, Debian itself is equally easy to use and in many cases runs faster due to less customization and tweaking integrated by default.
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