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