Previously, I posted about Rocky Linux. Scientific Linux however is very interesting to me as well. Like CentOS, Scientific Linux was a RHEL replication. It was fully funded and worked on by CERN and Fermilab.
The purpose of Scientific Linux was to deliver a unified platform used in the Physics community. When Red Hat took over the CentOS project, Scientific Linux announced that they would continue supporting Scientific Linux versions 6 and 7 through the end of the RHEL lifecycle, but would consolidate on CentOS 8 for future projects (announcement).
This seemed like a great idea at the time. In 2014, RedHat and CentOS made the announcement that they would join forces and work together to maintain the one to one distribution. There didn’t seem to be a reason to continue making Scientific Linux this would allow CERN and Fermilab to focus on their core priorities, which is large Physics projects, not operating system development.
In December of 2020, Red Hat reneged on it’s previous promise to the CentOS community and instead of maintaining a 1 to 1 package distribution for CentOS, ir would use CentOS as a feeder to it’s RHEL project. What this means is, instead of CentOS being an Enterprise grade Linux, it would be distributed as a fully functioning operating system, and bug fixes in CentOS would be used for distribution in the further upstream RHEL OS.
In response to this, Scientific Linux is now re-evaluating it’s previous decision to halt development on Scientific Linux version 8. In this announcement, they said that they will come up with a decision in Q1 of 2021 about how they will move forward.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed on the SL linux distribution. I’ve used it in the past and have found it to be really well done. It does lag the RHEL distribution a little, but overall it’s a solid product.
