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Comment by omnifischer | Hacker News Reader

I have been to several synchrotrons, central facilities. Most had stock install of centos (whatever stable on that day). All user software was always installed in a nfs mounted /soft/+++ so that everyone could source it and use it. These days many of them are moving to 'xubuntu' (mainly avoiding the unity+gnome3 mess). Many of sci-devs are using ubuntu as their daily driver - so getting the latest python (bio), or math package, is newer in *ubuntu.

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> These days many of them are moving to 'xubuntu' (mainly avoiding the unity+gnome3 mess).

Wouldn't Debian work a bit better and come with a better long-term stability policy? It seems strange to rely on the *buntus unless you're specifically relying either on proprietary software that's Ubuntu-targeted, or commercial support from Canonical. (But there are some spaces, e.g. GPGPU compute, where either of these might be relevant and Debian still has quite a bit of work to do before it can be relevant.)

In my experience scientific and enterprise organization don't use Linux for any given feature, but because it is available. In many ways they use Linux despite it being Linux. So whatever is the least obscure would be ideal.

> Wouldn't Debian work a bit better and come with a better long-term stability policy?

Both have 5y LTS support?

Ubuntu 18 is getting 10 year LTS support.

> These days many of them are moving to 'xubuntu' (mainly avoiding the unity+gnome3 mess).

And here I am using Ubuntu with Window Maker.

I guess things are different when you're installing across a lot of different systems and don't want to have to coordinate One More Thing.

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