After 14 years of development, Fermilab has announced that Scientific Linux will be discontinued. To give you an idea of how old an operating system of almost three decades is, say that this Red Hat-based operating system is older than Ubuntu, about 5 months older. The system developed by Canonical released its first version in October 2004, while Scientific Linux was released for the first time in May of the same year.
Scientific Linux is a science-focused, Linux-based operating system that is free and open source. Like some distributions like Linux Mint on Ubuntu, this distribution is RHEL-based, which is the acronym for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now, its developers have decided to stop and not launch new versions of this operating system. Scientific Linux 8 was expected to be released, but this version will never be released, or it won't be if things don't change much.
Scientific Linux will no longer release any more updates
Pat Riechecky, from Femilab, already announced which the computer will start using CentOS Linux 8, for which they will have to update all the equipment they are using (Femilab) at CERN. CentOS 8 is expected to be released later this year. The team will participate in the development of the next version of CentOS and will continue to collaborate with CERN and other laboratories to make CentOS an even better platform for high-energy physics computing.
As for the most recent previous versions, both Scientific Linux 6 and Scientific Linux 7 will continue to receive support until the end of its life cycle, which coincides with the years 2020 and 2024. That will be the date on which this scientific distribution will definitely die, at least as far as updates are concerned.
In any case, and allow me the license to joke (or not) about it, it reassures me that these labs continue to use Linux and not move to Windows.
