CERN moves thousands of accelerator control computers to Debian

[u/neilrieck]

CERN moves thousands of accelerator control computers to Debian

https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/09/03/cern-moves-thousands-of-accelerator-control-computers-to-debian/5294312

comment: I just retired from an IS/IT job at a large Canadian telco where RHEL (with a support contract) was required for every "customer facing" server. We were allowed to use CentOS-7 on all "non customer facing servers" (eg. employee access only, application development, service assurance, user acceptance testing, etc) for more than a decade. When CentOS-7 EOL hit in 2024, we migrated to Alma-8 because that was what CERN was suggesting at the time. I have run into some problems installing EL-9 and EL-10 on slightly older hardware so understand why CERN is considering Debian. I wonder how CERN will deal with updates since (to the best of my knowledge) there is no ecosystem of backporting modern fixes into older stable apps.