I've switched to using Fedora for myself and my users. If you are prepared for
its short lifecycle, it is actually very usable. I've found upgrading to be
quite painless. I don't use Fedora on servers for obvious reasons.
I used ubuntu briefly a decade ago on a laptop and struggled with it. Not a put
down on ubuntu but more a statement about myself.
I was used to redhat's conventions. I wrote a lot of code then and knew how to
find development rpms, where the files are located after installed. I struggled
with the dpkg/apt/synaptics for me. Rpm/dnf is a lot easier for me probably
because I am used to it. Dnf is pretty much yum so there is no problem there.
And I knew a bit of how to build rpms myself. I was loathe to learn dpkg.
We've gone with Fedora on the desktop and CentOS on servers and desktops
Hope this helps.
On 1/30/20 7:57 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
At this point in terms of application support for EL 7 (including SL 7) from
external entities (such as Calibre -- there are others), I am going soon to be
forced to go to another Linux. The options appear to be drop EL entirely and go
to Ubuntu LTS ("stable") current, or to stay with EL and use Springdale
(Princeton) EL8 when (if?) it is available, or Oracle 8 EL. Thus far, everyone
I have contacted who did a clean install of Oracle 8 (and then copied back
files, directory trees, etc., from the non-systems areas of an EL 7 working
system) have had no issues. However, I am very concerned about support for
Oracle 8 other than purchasing support from Oracle. Do the various professional
repositories for SL 7 (and EL 7 in general) such as EPEL have an EL 8 version
that work seamlessly with Oracle 8 (or Springdale for that matter)?
In the best of all possible worlds, I or my students would have time to build
applications from source -- but there are too many and not enough time, forcing
the use of repositories with pre-built RPMs (or DEBs if we switch to Ubuntu).
Note that we run the same base OS on servers (including HPC compute servers with
Nvidia CUDA GPUs) as well as desktop and laptop machines, all presently X86-64
based (this may change for at least some of the servers).
Any advice would be appreciated.
Yasha Karant
