From below:

Will look forward to move to another distribution.

End excerpt.

The question is:  which distro?  My first hope was Oracle EL 8 -- given 
that Oracle has to compete with IBM and thus, unlike CentOS that may or 
may not fit into the profit/business long term plan of IBM (long term -- 
less than a decade, but more than three or four years -- at least 
through EL 9 first production release), provide a "working and usable" 
product, just as was SL.  After reading comments on this list, I am more 
tempted to give up on EL and move to Ubuntu LTS.  But -- I have not made 
a decision. For those who require a reliable, production, stable, but 
reasonably "current" Linux environment ("current" means that when I need 
an application, I will not find that there are no ports of the recent 
releases of the application to the Linux I am using because the major 
libraries -- .so files -- are too "obsolete"), what choices are 
available?  In so far as possible, I want the same distro to work on 
servers (and have CUDA support for compute servers with Nvidia GPU 
compute boards as well as MPI) and my laptop "workstation".

If there is a more appropriate list to which to move this discussion, 
advice would be appreciated.   However, such a list needs to be for 
"professional" use, not "enthusiast end-user" use (who are looking for a 
different gaming environment, etc., than MS Win or Mac OS X).

Yasha Karant

On 2/22/20 5:46 PM, Marcelo Ferrarotti wrote:
> Hello there,
>
> I'm quite sad about SL EoL.
>
> I'm no scientist, just an electronics guy who do a lot of research in 
> RF (as hobby, mostly testing antennas for ham radio in VHF bands) from 
> Argentina.
>
> Fot SL the most "well done" linux distribution, for people who simply 
> knows.
>
> Will look forward to move to another distribution.
>
> Cheers from Argentina
>
> El sáb., 22 de febrero de 2020 8:46 p. m., Keith Lofstrom 
> <[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> escribió:
>
>     I'm an independent electronics inventor, heavily dependent
>     on both competent software and competent laboratory science,
>     both for the knowledge I depend on and the tools I use to
>     transform that knowledge into products and services for
>     my customers.
>
>     SL has been a very good tool for that.  Thanks to all who
>     have contributed.
>
>     I depend on "benign neglect" for a stable computing
>     platform - just enough funding and staffing to fix urgent
>     problems, but not continuously mutate the platform to
>     conform to ephemeral fashion or management whim.
>
>     I moved /from/ Windows to gain that stability, even if
>     that limits the choice of new widgets I can attach to my
>     (older) computers.  I have plenty of replacement-spare
>     old widgets, and I don't need the distraction of a
>     rapidly mutating platform optimized for market churn
>     and planned-obsolescence sales.
>
>     I'm actually glad that Microsoft, Apple, and IBM are
>     busily churning those markets, because it keeps their
>     customers distracted and not bothering me with those
>     distractions while I think and work.  The hardware cast
>     off by the fashion-chasers is still abundant on eBay,
>     and I have enough of it to last me for life (except
>     for the batteries and backlights for my old Thinkpads).
>
>     I presume there are enough like me, some of whom are on
>     this list, that we can continue to carve out a community
>     space on top of CentOS, focused on inquiry and reliability.
>
>     If CentOS 9 or 10 or 11 goes off the rails, there are
>     enough of us here to tweak CentOS 7 or 8 into something
>     we can continue to use, just like Linux was "in the good
>     old days".
>
>     While "security by obscurity" is not optimum, I presume a
>     smaller community of impoverished science geeks is a less
>     tempting target for professional software criminals than
>     million-dollar IT departments for billion-dollar
>     corporations and governments, or billions of hapless
>     consumers.  We are part of the global target, but we are
>     unlikely to attract specific attention from the bad guys.
>
>     And while we still benefit from the use of servers at
>     Fermilabs for our "static" distro and our active mailing
>     list, perhaps we should have a backup plan for migration
>     in case some bureaucrat decides to pull the plug on us.
>     That has /always/ been a risk for what we do here; we are
>     one presidential tweet away from Saint Louis USDA exile.
>
>     As a community of scientific, like-minded Linux users,
>     let's begin to prepare a rudimentary plan B, and hope
>     that we never need to implement it.
>
>     Keith
>
>     -- 
>     Keith Lofstrom [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>