CERN transitioning industrial computers to Debian after being a longtime RHEL institution

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, besides being well known for its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is known among longtime Linux users as a RHEL/CentOS shop. CERN formally even co-maintained the Scientific Linux RHEL derivative with other educational/research institutions in the past. So to much surprise now, CERN is transitioning to Debian Linux for industrial accelerator-control computers.

CERN talked about this exciting news at the MiniDebConf that took place in Winterthur, Switzerland this past weekend. CERN had used their RHEL-derived Scientific Linux for about a decade prior to moving to CentOS in 2015. Now after a decade with CentOS, they are moving on and embracing Debian for a portion of their systems.

CERN engineers had considered moving to CentOS Stream as a more natural pathway but ultimately they say "the straw that broke the camel's back" to abandon Red Hat Enterprise Linux for their industrial accelerator-control computers was the "-march=x86-64-v2" compiler flag default as "forced obsolescence" for old hardware.

Among the challenges they have faced though in their Debian on-boarding is the lack of standard tooling for automated building and publishing of packages - a lot of gaps in the official tooling. There are also a number of tools not supporting multiple versions of the same packages.

CERN is planning by the end of 2026 to have all 2,200+ of their industrial computers and embedded systems running Debian 13. Those wishing to learn more can see this video presentation (AV1 WebM) from the MiniDebConf.

Update: CERN has clarified that their focus with the migration is on their industrial accelerator-control computers while data centers and experimental computing remain on RHEL/AlmaLinux.