Hi Harry, I started using Debian about 10-15 years ago, and never changed my opinion since. I had tested various others before, like redhat, suse, ubuntu etc. The stable version of Debian is indeed very stable, as there are no version changes, only bug fixes etc. The new release is about every three years, and upgrading does not break the system (with rpm based systems I remember quite frequent re-installs, because the system got messed up). The long-term support is indeed very long.
The main repositories of Debian include a great number of scientific / crystallographic packages, e.g. raster3d, pymol, clipper-, ccp4-, mmdb2-libraries and what not. Due to the philosophy of sticking to a version, and only to bug fixes and security releases, Debian is often not affected by security holes, e.g. the SHELX server was save from heart-bleed when it came out, because heart-bleed require more modern versions of whatever library was affected (SSL?). Same is true for the recent foul version of XZ. Debian is POSIX compliant, so it doesn't mess around with standards, and for configuration you can rely on what you find on the web. There is a saying 'even a chicken can install Debian, as you only need to hit Enter', which is not far from true. Cheers, Tim On Fri, 26 Apr 2024 16:46:17 +0100 Harry Powell <0000193323b1e616-dmarc-requ...@jiscmail.ac.uk> wrote: > Hi folks > > For many years I’ve been using Scientific Linux as my OS of choice > (when not using my Mac) - but it’s been discontinued. SL was based on > RHEL, and had useful things like a less-buggy Fortran/C/C++ compiler > than that released by RH. > > What do people here recommend as a replacement? > > Harry > ######################################################################## > > To unsubscribe from the CCP4BB list, click the following link: > https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/WA-JISC.exe?SUBED1=CCP4BB&A=1 > > This message was issued to members of www.jiscmail.ac.uk/CCP4BB, a > mailing list hosted by www.jiscmail.ac.uk, terms & conditions are > available at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/ -- Tim Gruene Head of the Centre for X-ray Structure Analysis Faculty of Chemistry University of Vienna Phone: +43-1-4277-70202 GPG Key ID = A46BEE1A ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the CCP4BB list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/WA-JISC.exe?SUBED1=CCP4BB&A=1 This message was issued to members of www.jiscmail.ac.uk/CCP4BB, a mailing list hosted by www.jiscmail.ac.uk, terms & conditions are available at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/
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