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