Hacker News Reader

I believe NetBSD would be better for these machines. NetBSD supports old systems quite well and have a release cycle that in cases are longer than Debian.

But, CERN may have some proprietary applications on those systems that force them to use a specific setup which is hard to replicate in other distros.

View on HN

Most software at CERN is open source. But you are right, for things which are quite specific to CERN, like the control systems of the accelerator, there's also some proprietary code. Same for hardware actually, CERN develops open hardware too.

https://opensource.web.cern.ch/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com