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.

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.

Any proof?

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.

I just don't see the "LLM-speak" here at all, for example. And I'm very tired of people who throw around the LLM-power critique as an easy criticism when there's no clear basis for it. It's lazy and stupid.

There are certain styles for a post like this that some people may not like but things like subheads and what would be, by historical standards somewhat clipped writing are just how writing in this content is mostly encouraged theese days. I'd just add that when people do post long-form New Yorker pieces there's plenty of whining about getting to the point.

I think this mostly boils down to experience with writing styles. I am an avid reader, albeit mostly read in Ukrainian/Russian, but I can confidently tell whether some paragraph was written by Platonov or Nabokov or Zhadan or Sorokin; even when the guys are stylizing their texts (Sorokin does this all the time) there are still subtle things in how text is composed that tell you who wrote it. If my reading menu was mostly contemporary blogs, probably I would be less sensitive to distinct writing styles.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Yea, long time user of both here (I even supported ATLAS workloads running on our public UK cloud). Debian long-term is the right choice

We might have exchanged some mails back in the day probably, then. :D

I'm in this for a couple of decades now.

Quite possibly! It was always a pleasure to see the ATLAS jobs running in a process list on an OpenStack hypervisor. We supported Lancaster University for compute (amongst others!).

You can pay companies just fine to support Debian.

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.

It's so bad. Coming back to RHEL (new client requirement) after sitting mostly on Debian for years is such a bizzare experience.

You want to install a PostgreSQL database, it doesn't even initialize it, you need to manually do DB init and the rest of the dance.

You want to run DRBD, sorry, we didn't bother to pick that kernel compile option, you can add extra repository for that. But hey, it's the kernel module, which means now you have to enroll cert in Secureboot, and that requires actual KVM access to the VM for someone to confirm it so now I'm on meeting with customer's IT just so they click some buttons in VM's boot process.

Even some common utilities are not in main repos but need EPEL

Ironically back around 2007 we had to use RHEL to get DRBD setup for the Redhat HA / Pacemaker things

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.

Article quite a mess and, honestly, largely devoid of content. For starters, complains that SL should've continued because other community options might eventually be discontinued/change (as happened with CentOS). Like, duh. By this reasoning every effort should be duplicated to guard against the possibility that one option might disappear. In the end though all those RHEL rebuilds depend on Red Hat maintaining RHEL. The article never notes this and indirectly equalizes the effort and existence of a a genuinely independent community-driven distro (Debian, that CERN decided to move their accelerator-control computers) and RHEL rebuild (e.g., AlmaLinux, that CERN will keep the rest of infrastructure on, e.g. data centers, compute farms, etc). And here's the misguided part. If SL as still active it'll have been necessary to recompile numerous upstream RHEL source packages to remove the microarchitecture restrictions. This will've turned SL to entire new, independently maintained distro. The thing they wanted to avoid.

lo and behold, a 1000 word sample comes back in Pangram as AI generated. This should not be worth anyone's time (and maybe you have spent more time on your comment than the author did in their blogpost).