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.  The options appear to be drop 
EL entirely and go to Ubuntu  LTS ("stable") current, or to stay with EL 
and use Springdale (Princeton) EL8 when (if?) it is available, or Oracle 
8 EL.  Thus far, everyone I have contacted who did a clean install of 
Oracle 8 (and then copied back files, directory trees, etc., from the 
non-systems areas of an EL 7 working system) have had no issues.  
However, I am very concerned about support for Oracle 8 other than 
purchasing support from Oracle.  Do the various professional 
repositories for SL 7 (and EL 7 in general) such as EPEL have an EL 8 
version that work seamlessly with Oracle 8 (or Springdale for that matter)?

In the best of all possible worlds, I or my students would have time to 
build applications from source -- but there are too many and not enough 
time, forcing the use of repositories with pre-built RPMs (or DEBs if we 
switch to Ubuntu).  Note that we run the same base OS on servers 
(including HPC compute servers with Nvidia CUDA GPUs) as well as desktop 
and laptop machines, all presently X86-64 based (this may change for at 
least some of the servers).

Any advice would be appreciated.

Yasha Karant