I've switched to using Fedora for myself and my users. If you are prepared for its short lifecycle, it is actually very usable. I've found upgrading to be quite painless. I don't use Fedora on servers for obvious reasons. I used ubuntu briefly a decade ago on a laptop and struggled with it. Not a put down on ubuntu but more a statement about myself. I was used to redhat's conventions. I wrote a lot of code then and knew how to find development rpms, where the files are located after installed. I struggled with the dpkg/apt/synaptics for me. Rpm/dnf is a lot easier for me probably because I am used to it. Dnf is pretty much yum so there is no problem there. And I knew a bit of how to build rpms myself. I was loathe to learn dpkg. We've gone with Fedora on the desktop and CentOS on servers and desktops Hope this helps. On 1/30/20 7:57 PM, 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. 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