Scientists at CERN and Fermilab are using this Linux distro after Scientific Linux retired

If you have been around the Linux world for a while, there is a chance that you'll have heard of Scientific Linux, a distribution made by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the Deutsches Eletronen-Synchrotron (DESY), and ETH Zurich for their needs.

Unfortunately, it was announced in April 2019 that no new feature development would go on and maintenance support would go on until the end of life of the Scientific Linux 6.x and 7.x releases. However, an alternative Linux distribution was offered up as a spiritual successor to Scientific Linux.

On 7 December 2022, it was announced that CERN and Fermilab jointly planned to use a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based (RHEL) distribution called AlmaLinux. The two distros are very similar because they're both based on RHEL and AlmaLinux delivers the same benefits as Scientific Linux did.

The two organizations said that they would use AlmaLinux as the standard distribution for the experiments at their facilities after reflecting on experience and discussions with experiments and other stakeholders. They said that AlmaLinux was gaining popularity in the community thanks to its long life cycle, extended architecture support, rapid release cycle, upstream community contributors, and support for security advisory metadata. It had also been shown to be "perfectly compatible" with other rebuilds and RHEL.

It was also mentioned back then that CERN and, to a lesser extent, Fermilab, would use RHEL for some of their services and applications. Both Scientific Linux 7, which was used at Fermilab, and CentOS 7 which was being used by CERN, would be supported until June 2024, which has now just passed.

Interestingly, despite the name, Scientific Linux did not bundle a large selection of scientific software. Instead, it acted as a common Linux distribution for various labs and universities around the world without duplicated effort. For this reason, AlmaLinux perfectly fills the void left.

The current version of AlmaLinux is AlmaLinux 9 which was released in May 2022. It has received several point releases since then, the most recent being 9.4. It will have active support until 31 May 2027, and security support until 31 May 2032.

So, if you're interested to see what all the big wig scientists are using on their computers, now you know, it's AlmaLinux. While it's positioned as an Enterprise operating system, anybody can run it on a supported computer and the long life of each release is very nice.

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