On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 2:20 PM Larry Linder
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> I would be interested in a contribution to help support this effort.
>
> We have a number of SL 6.9 boxes, we would stay there for a while as all
> of our cad tools work.  There are some things it doesn't have but we
> have never noticed them because they are not useful in the the day to
> day running of a Business.

I'm guessing you have locked licenses for expensive old CAD software?
May I suggest looking at your CAD licenses and list the CAD tools? If
the vendor has failed to keep their software up to date with operating
system releases, that's their problem, not Scientific Linux's fault.
And no one here can solve that for you, especially without knowing the
names of the CAD software in question.

> We evaluated Cent 8 and got no where.  It would not run our 25 year
> collection of scripts, or any of our new cad tools. In fact nothing
> would run.  Basically useless pile of code.  Another IBM blunder.  All
> they can talk about is packages, packages, packages and nothing useful.

I'm not happy with RHEL 8, and put the blame where it's due. on some
Red Hat decisions I disagree with. The partial and always incomplete
python2 to python 3 migration, the decisions to create multiple
unnecessary confusing software "channels", the refusal to publish
"devel" RPMs that are part of the compilation toolchain, and the Gnome
and KDE bloat are not my friends. It's taken time to clean up the
devel mess, which CentOS is doing successfully. There is no fix for
the "modularity" nightmare, I'm awaiting RHEL 9 for that to be
discarded wholesale as the inherent instability becomes even more
apparent.

> We counted the number of mouse click to do a simple jobs and it was
> alarming.  People can have repedative motion injuries.  This has a
> serous impact on our workers Comp bill.  Maybe RH 9 will junk the desk
> top and move on to something a person can use.  The other bitch is the

Looks like it's affecting your wrists already? If I may be
sanctimonious for a moment, it won't be "Red Hat 9". Red Hat 9 was
published in 2003. It will be RHEL 9. I admit, it' can be confusing,
since my first significant Linux operating system was Red Hat 4.2, and
recruiters think I meant RHEL 4.2. The difference may mean less,
they're both ancient now, But there are trademarks involved, so a bit
of awareness can help make your notes more powerful.

Open source GUI's, and GUI's in general are a problem. Discarding
Gnome in favor of a much lighter window manager may help you. I
publish RPM buiilding tools for vtwm, which is very lightweight and
rock-solid, over at https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__github.com_nkadel_vtwm-2D5.5.x-2Dsrpm&d=DwIBaQ&c=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA&r=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A&m=UDR09uocJrwBdM6dyyqQZzsNrzJSNz6-mxaipo8d_cE&s=FkXRw2vUvLLCfbBh6AnDqouFPanMAWsONyP46fdcIA0&e=  . If you
need help switching from the default Gnome to a much lighter window
manager, ask.

There is also an old essay by Eric S. Raymond about open source GUI's,
titled "The Luxury of Ignorance".  It's worth reading and may be worth
pointing the authors of your CAD tools to it at
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.catb.org_esr_writings_cups-2Dhorror.html&d=DwIBaQ&c=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA&r=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A&m=UDR09uocJrwBdM6dyyqQZzsNrzJSNz6-mxaipo8d_cE&s=LUfI5jKmScc47iAPgfNszfJODRIrUZoPRIwRO9gm47k&e=  .

> basic redesign of the UNIX file system and start / stop functions.  The
> system-bla bla bla stuff is hard to remember and takes too much time to
> look up every time something needs to be restarted.

As much as I dislike a great deal of systemd, you're out of luck in
the Linux world. The old "/sbin/service" and "/sbin/chkconfig"
commands work, you can usually get away with using those as wrappers
for systemd.

> At some point the Industrial / Scientific OS must diverge for the
> telephone mentally.

Wait, what??? Scientific Linux, for me as a user and supporter, has
been a useful, stable, integrated rebundling of an industrial grade
operating system. If you want a different root operating system, I'd
urge you to take it up with Red HAt, not Scientific Linux or CentOS.
Are you under the impression that it is a distinct OS development
project that could build a new and entirely distinct OS?

And oh, my, if you want to discard systemd, you'll need to go to an OS
based on an entirely distinct kernel, say one of the BSD's.