Yet another Hacker News

Abandoning Scientific Linux Was a Mistake

51 points elashri 1 hour ago 19 comments

darkwi11ow 58 minutes ago | parent

Scientific Linux was great! Sad to see the blog in its memory having so much llm-speak. I hope one day writing without llm will become a trend.

GlacierFox 47 minutes ago | parent

Urgh. Thanks for saving me a click.

sevg 46 minutes ago | parent

Yeah but it seems to be a losing battle, sadly.

Low effort LLM-written content gets upvoted here anyway, despite the writer having little respect for peoples’ time.

trwhite 46 minutes ago | parent

Any proof?

IshKebab 40 minutes ago | parent

You obviously can't get proof. But there are enough stylistic tells to confidently say that AI was substantially involved in writing this. It's annoying to read. That's enough to dislike AI writing IMO.

satnhak 36 minutes ago | parent

"Scientific Linux was never simply "RHEL with a different wallpaper." It gave the scientific community an institutionally independent implementation of the Enterprise Linux platform."

bayindirh 25 minutes ago | parent

Subsection titles, and how the text flows. When I read these kinds of LLM-Powered posts, I feel the same thing. Like remembering the taste of some canned food which was not great, but I had to consume to stay alive. It feels like junk food, not optimized to taste great, but doesn't reek of machine oil either. A price-optimized, slightly unhealthy substance which is somewhat compatible with my body because of food engineering magic.

These posts are not only a waste of time, but it also makes me feel deceived and betrayed. Why this is important? Because it's the honest take and bears the load of the reality of the post.

Please, don't make me read something you didn't write.

Disclosure: This post, incl. llm-sounding paragraph is typed by a human. All of the keystrokes are 100% human and made possibe by burning ATPs and firing tiny lightning bolts across some brain cells. No humans are harmed or GPU hours are burned in this comment.

Total water consumption: 50ml of cold spring water, because I'm thirsty.

applfanboysbgon 4 minutes ago | parent

Any proof that you're a human and not a sealion?

consp 25 minutes ago | parent

After two alineas I was fully convinced it was llm slop and the message it might have intended to pass is completely lost.

dynm 12 minutes ago | parent

People are asking for evidence. FWIW, pangram classifies this post as 97% AI, 3% human.

znpy 45 minutes ago | parent

I didn’t comment much on this whole topic but what I wondered is: why not Rocky Linux?

It’s quite literally the modern day CentOS

viraptor 39 minutes ago | parent

> AlmaLinux and RHEL remain the main supported Linux distributions across much of the organization

Alma and Rocky provide almost the same thing.

pferde 38 minutes ago | parent

I suspect that at the time they had to make a decision, Rocky Linux was not in good enough state, so they went with Debian, and now they already standardized around Debian, so no need to change.

intoXbox 43 minutes ago | parent

The benefits of SL described are pretty handwaivy to me. Having used a fork of scientific Linux, this was a huge pain because of outdated openSSL packages. Now you could argue this deserves being maintained separately, but I think it makes total sense to use the security- benefits of long term distros and only modify the parts required for reproducible scientific work.

I was really glad when the vendor started unofficially supporting OpenSuse so I could finally use git on these distros.

etdznots 42 minutes ago | parent

Sad that the author chose to generate slop instead of writing an article about SL

_joel 41 minutes ago | parent

Well they could have used Debian from the start. I get why, but it's such a strange argument, the way it's posited.

bayindirh 16 minutes ago | parent

If I remember correctly, the reason why Scientific Linux was RHEL based instead of Debian because RedHat was a company and can pay them for services.

We used to run it on our Grid nodes, and while it was not bad, it was not that smooth, either. It was a little kludgy but worked if you didn't diverge from the happy paths much.

Now Debian has Extended Long Time Support via Freexian, I believe CERN has enough confidence to use Debian instead of RH family, and that will make lives of some people way easier. Debian is still easier to manage than RH based systems, and .deb is a really good package manager, and is arguably more sophisticated than RPM.

tempay 7 minutes ago | parent

I think the premise of this article is wrong. Scientific Linux was important once upon a time but these days with userspace containers there is no need for the same level of homogeneity. In practice everyone is using Apptainer on machines that don’t have a singular purpose.