Aside: I recently fired up a server with Debian 13 and the size was only 900MB compared to 2G of Debian 11, 12 and Ubuntu. Anyone knows what changed?
13 dropped i386 support, but I’m not sure if that would account for that much.
Supporting red hat costs 5.5 Mio for the next ~8 years, and the switch to debian? What would replacing the old hardware (~20 years old) cost?
It’s bad for red hat, good for debian and suse wasn’t even considered?
tldr: their infra that interfaces directly with accelerator uses really old computers and they are unsupported in newer versions of rhel. Only those machines are affected by these good news.
Personally, this looks weird, they are planning to run like 20 years old machines for another 10 to save money on replacing them while at the same time they are planning (or already in the process) migration to k8s?
CERN’s Black Holes now will be based on debian 13)
Weird. I thought CERN used alma linux; https://linux.web.cern.ch/almalinux/
Almalinux is used for desktop computers (along with RHEL and windows). This is about the control system computers, which have dedicated hardware for various tasks. It was planned for them to also use almalinux, but they dropped support for a bunch of old hardware architectures. This made Alma unsuitable as some of these custom computers just would not be supported. The cost/risk of redesigning just would not make sense. Hence: plan B, which is Debian and its many supported hardware architectures.
what a weird title. the actual article is fact base but the title is just weird. why is it good (or bad) news? why not just say “CERN moves over 2,200 control system to drbian 13 to support the older hardware”
