Abandoning Scientific Linux Was a Mistake

https://blog.melashri.net/posts/scientific-linux-mistake/

48•elashri•1h ago

Comments

darkwi11ow•56m ago

Scientific Linux was great! Sad to see the blog in its memory having so much llm-speak. I hope one day writing without llm will become a trend.

GlacierFox•45m ago

Urgh. Thanks for saving me a click.

sevg•44m ago

Yeah but it seems to be a losing battle, sadly.

Low effort LLM-written content gets upvoted here anyway, despite the writer having little respect for peoples’ time.

trwhite•43m ago

Any proof?

IshKebab•38m ago

You obviously can't get proof. But there are enough stylistic tells to confidently say that AI was substantially involved in writing this. It's annoying to read. That's enough to dislike AI writing IMO.

satnhak•34m ago

"Scientific Linux was never simply "RHEL with a different wallpaper." It gave the scientific community an institutionally independent implementation of the Enterprise Linux platform."

bayindirh•22m ago

Subsection titles, and how the text flows. When I read these kinds of LLM-Powered posts, I feel the same thing. Like remembering the taste of some canned food which was not great, but I had to consume to stay alive. It feels like junk food, not optimized to taste great, but doesn't reek of machine oil either. A price-optimized, slightly unhealthy substance which is somewhat compatible with my body because of food engineering magic.

These posts are not only a waste of time, but it also makes me feel deceived and betrayed. Why this is important? Because it's the honest take and bears the load of the reality of the post.

Please, don't make me read something you didn't write.

Disclosure: This post, incl. llm-sounding paragraph is typed by a human. All of the keystrokes are 100% human and made possibe by burning ATPs and firing tiny lightning bolts across some brain cells. No humans are harmed or GPU hours are burned in this comment.

Total water consumption: 50ml of cold spring water, because I'm thirsty.

applfanboysbgon•2m ago

Any proof that you're a human and not a sealion?

consp•23m ago

After two alineas I was fully convinced it was llm slop and the message it might have intended to pass is completely lost.

dynm•10m ago

People are asking for evidence. FWIW, pangram classifies this post as 97% AI, 3% human.

znpy•43m ago

I didn’t comment much on this whole topic but what I wondered is: why not Rocky Linux?

It’s quite literally the modern day CentOS

viraptor•37m ago

> AlmaLinux and RHEL remain the main supported Linux distributions across much of the organization

Alma and Rocky provide almost the same thing.

pferde•36m ago

I suspect that at the time they had to make a decision, Rocky Linux was not in good enough state, so they went with Debian, and now they already standardized around Debian, so no need to change.

intoXbox•41m ago

The benefits of SL described are pretty handwaivy to me. Having used a fork of scientific Linux, this was a huge pain because of outdated openSSL packages. Now you could argue this deserves being maintained separately, but I think it makes total sense to use the security- benefits of long term distros and only modify the parts required for reproducible scientific work.

I was really glad when the vendor started unofficially supporting OpenSuse so I could finally use git on these distros.

etdznots•40m ago

Sad that the author chose to generate slop instead of writing an article about SL

_joel•39m ago

Well they could have used Debian from the start. I get why, but it's such a strange argument, the way it's posited.

bayindirh•14m ago

If I remember correctly, the reason why Scientific Linux was RHEL based instead of Debian because RedHat was a company and can pay them for services.

We used to run it on our Grid nodes, and while it was not bad, it was not that smooth, either. It was a little kludgy but worked if you didn't diverge from the happy paths much.

Now Debian has Extended Long Time Support via Freexian, I believe CERN has enough confidence to use Debian instead of RH family, and that will make lives of some people way easier. Debian is still easier to manage than RH based systems, and .deb is a really good package manager, and is arguably more sophisticated than RPM.

tempay•5m ago

I think the premise of this article is wrong. Scientific Linux was important once upon a time but these days with userspace containers there is no need for the same level of homogeneity. In practice everyone is using Apptainer on machines that don’t have a singular purpose.

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Abandoning Scientific Linux Was a Mistake

Comments

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