On 2020-04-15 22:12, Tim via users wrote:
> Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming wrote:
>> Scientific Linux is also a clone of RHEL? Is it free too? I haven't
>> heard much of it so I guess it is not very popular.
>
> It's tailored to a specific community, not exclusively, but there's a
> definite bias.
Scientific Linux is tailored to the scientific community?
There are many scientific communities. SL was created by
Fermilab, CERN, DESY and by ETH Zurich which are
mainly high-energy physics labs. I do applied math and
ecology, but have used CERN ROOT for demonstration of
some remote sensing algorithms. ROOT is one of those
big systems with a long list of dependencies that used to
be very difficult to install on linux distros. It happens to use
some of the same libraries as the NASA software I use, so
was convenient for working with some NASA data sets.
A few years ago, support in linux distros for some of these
libraries was very uneven, in part because the libraries were
a moving target, so it made sense to have a distro that
provided suitable versions for key libraries. Today, the
libraries are more stable so you can use CentOS 8 out of
the ISO for things that were hard to do on previous releases.
(There are, however, still some applications needing libraries
that use weird build systems and don't (yet) have RHEL 8
packages.)