On Thu, Jan 30, 2020 at 05:57:24PM -0800, Yasha Karant wrote:
>
> At this point in terms of application support for EL 7 (including SL
> 7) from external entities (such as Calibre -- there are others), I
> am going soon to be forced to go to another Linux. ...
> 
> Any advice would be appreciated.
> 

We are looking at Ubuntu -

- direction is very stable, each next release is "the same as the previous release",
  no surprises, no strange changes, no confusion.
- trivial upgrade path from version N to version N+1. (works as well as MacOS).
- easy to google problems and solutions
- works well on laptops (Red Hat was always behind on Wifi and other important drivers)
- commonality with Raspberry Pi and other SoC systems (everything is Debian or Ubuntu based, nothing is Red Hat based).
- many hardware vendors now supply Ubuntu and Debian centric drivers and support

Now that both Ubuntu and Red Hat use systemd, NetworkManager & co management
of both has become very similar.

Only big remaining difference is the package manager - apt vs rpm/yum, but even
here Red Hat have muddied the waters by switching to dnf and a new package format
(new checksum algorythms).

Since building rpm packages was always a major pain, I am not sure I want to figure
it all out again with CentOS/EL-8 just to find out that I cannot (or I can?) build
RPM packages that work on all three - el6, el7 and el8. Might as well cut out
the middleman and use "git pull; make install" to install and manage the 2-3-4 scripts
that I manage with RPM packages right now.

I have been saying the above to everybody for the last 6 months and not a single
person so far had answered with "let's stick with Red Hat" or "let's stick with Red Hat
because of important reason X".

-- 
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada