Interesting piece of news (I found it because my wife sent me an image saying “IBM just forced CERN to abandon 2200 computers - so CERN abandoned IBM instead”)
This reminds me that some Distros just decided to abandon support for perfectly good x86 hardware (in fact Debian is one of them…)
I saw and read that too. Sounds like they must have a fairly large staff to take care of all these computers.
I’m not sure I would have made the same choice they did. I trust Ubuntu will be around. You can run a supported version for 15 years, but that’s with a support agreement. Money talks.
One of the guys in our village was a scientiste at cern, every year he gives conferences around the design and development going on at the centre. He is a window user but at work he was on linux
If he does that , he was a user, not a programmer at work.
You install linux on one, then clone it.
Do updates the same way … test it on one then clone.
Problems come from diverse architectures.
Yes, but over simplification. The devil is always in the details. With the number of computers there would be issues patching, rebooting, updating apps, rolling back the inevitable failures, and things we won’t think of.
“The devil is in the details, but so, sometimes, is salvation”
“The devil is in the detail, and everything we do in computing is a detail”
He was a technical engineer and extreamly well qualified, still writing and presenting papers at a high level. Hardly just a user. I never worked as a programmer although I did teach it at University for several years, would not class myself as just a user.
Not disputing that.
I think the reason he did not stay with Linux when retired was that he did not ever get in depth Linux experience at work .
I did not mean to downgrade users, it is just that programmers are different.
These are extremely old CPU’s, what RHEL started to require is a newer microarchitecture.
Newer in this case means not older than from 2008 (Intel Nehalem).
Debian is a conservative OS, so its kernel is still compiled to run on the old x86_64-v1.
So those computers are probably very-very old, yet still functional…
Personally I don’t think Ubuntu was a good choice. If the system needs to be rock solid -as I assume, controlling the LHC needs to be- Debian is a far better choice.
You have been watching steve
Think he was turned off by the system limitations imposed by the company on what he could or not do.Also he just bought a computer off a retailers with windows the only solution. I have chatter to him about changing and always offer a linux machine at his conference to project his slides, he did take that option last year also tried a mac the year before. Just out of interest but always takes time to transfer slides so sticks with what works at the time
My computer is 2010 (Sandy Bridge) which is x86-64-v2. It seems to have no limitations with modern software .
I think Red Hat’s cutoff of 2008 is not in line with hardware capabilities. It is perhaps more a matter of limiting support load.
We should be grateful for Debian’s conservatism.
He is a businessman, a marketing leader. I doubt he ever wrote a single line of code 
As an old conservative guy, yes I am
However Debian also dropped support for 32 bit CPU’s.
I’m not sure how long it will stay on x86-64-v1, as sticking to it strictly also means not using some features of newer CPU’s, potentially leaving unused power in them…
I think, a good solution would be to compile more kernels, similar to that when for 32 bit CPU’s existed PAE and non-PAE kernels. Or like today, there are normal kernels, and real-time kernels, all in the Debian repo.
There could be kernel for x86-64-v1, v2, v3, etc. and install whichever the best fits a particular hardware.
Agree with that for Debian releases.
One always has the option to compile one’s own kernel, even in Debian… but there may be problems with app binaries too.
Gentoo is a good option if one has to compile.
Even today there are 32bit binaries in Debian repos. Sparky Linux depends on them 
There are arm64, armhf binaries too.
I don’t see, why x86-64-v1, x86-64-v# binaries could no exist side by side - except of the extra space it requires, and of course the resources taken by compiling.
I was at a microsoft conference a few years back as i was a business partner at that point, he bounced onto the stage and did something similar what a great motivation speaker. The following year was boring no key speakers just do this the microsoft way, the following year I did not bother and removed them microsoft control from my business. Going fulltime linux.
I congratulate CERN on this move. My employer did the same thing (after Red Hat decided to deprecate CentOS). I, of course, advocated heavily for Ubuntu, and our IT team agreed (they also use it for development), so now we have Ubuntu for servers and work alongside Windows (for certain software needs). Still, we did not have to switch thousands of computers (it was maybe a few hundred). That is a task!
That is , in my view, the best application for Ubuntu. They can outperform Red Hat with software quality and support.
LTS means much more to business than to home users.
Absolutely. At work, it’s always LTS. Because of the support and stability. At home, I’m always using the latest versions and testing the daily builds. I’ve only had one big incident with a point release over the years, but that is something I would never want to risk in an enterprise setting.