As we know, there will be no SL8.  There will be an internal 
CERN-Fermilab CentOS 8 (CF8 for this discussion) distro, presumably 
limited to use at the two facilities and to the collaborations that are 
allowed to get the distro under the collaboration contract(s).  As I am 
no longer a member of the HEP community, I presume I cannot get the 
internal (by Fermilab/CERN) support (as we get on this list from 
Fermilab paid professional personnel), but (as required by the GPL and 
other licenses) any modifications in source form to produce whatever the 
CF8 version is -- if one really can build from such "source" (a very 
complicated and time consuming endeavor requiring test platforms for the 
build -- not production platforms).  Thus, I am looking for alternatives.

Under the current regulations from the university at which both myself 
and my wife are tenured full professors, all courses for the new term 
will be "on line" with a specification to use Zoom through the campus 
Blackboard system.  I will not go into the real implications of this 
edict in terms of required security or throughput to divers platforms 
and environments being used by students located afield.  Because her 
class has an enrollment of ten students (mine regrettably are *MUCH* 
larger), and because the university IT division claims it can support 
bi-direction simultaneous realtime video/audio under Zoom for all 
students/TAs/professors in each class (a "virtual" class equivalent to a 
physical class at one location), my wife needed a new computer.  She 
diverted some of her internal research funds for that purpose; after 
budgetary considerations from the College budget person (the University 
is made up of Colleges for the academic side), and after i did some 
research, I settled on a Dell Inspirion 7191 two-in-one that would allow 
her to "write" on the screen.  This machine is claimed to be fully 
supported by Ubuntu 18x LTS current (I can supply the document).

This is the first machine that I personally have configured for Ubuntu 
LTS, and I willing to outline the details of my experience if there is 
interest -- beyond the very brief summary below.   Suffice it to say 
that it "fully works" after some mucking about to find the real fix for 
the installed audio system.  I installed MATE (my preferred desktop, and 
of my wife), VirtualBox (for MS Win), etc., and all of the personal 
files from the SL7 predecessor easily moved via an external USB hard 
drive to the Ubuntu 18 LTS system.  These include her mozilla 
configurations (passwords, etc.) for both Firefox and Thunderbird, and 
the virtual machine used by VirtualBox.  Given the various "gotchas" and 
utilities she needs, including fixing the sound card detection issue and 
giving root a real login and GUI access (not just sudo from a terminal 
application), it has taken me two full days -- but it does all work, 
and, for an end user (such as my wife) is not discernibly different from 
SL7 MATE (not including the touchpad and lack of actual three pointing 
device keys by the touchpad -- but that is hardware, not software).  I 
do regret that she needed the machine *NOW*, and thus I will have to 
upgrade to Ubuntu 20.x LTS when that is in production and tested by the 
community.  Note also that there is no equivalent to this list for 
Ubuntu LTS that I can find, necessitating "digging" on the web to find 
solutions to issues.  Ubuntu claims that the migration from one major 
production release to the successor for LTS can be done in place without 
disruption -- I shall see if that is true.  (I will copy all personal 
files to an external hard drive in case the migration "steps on things".)

I have no idea how Ubuntu LTS server will behave -- that is our next 
hurdle.  Note that at as a server, Xwindows and a GUI does not come as 
part of the "base" package and will need to be installed.  Despite the 
fact that our servers do not use GUI applications very often, there are 
some graphical "front ends" that make the observation of data (including 
system performance and issues) much more evident than strictly character 
based data.

As an enduser workstation, Ubuntu 18x LTS does seem to work.

To everyone:  stay safe, stay well.

Yasha Karant