I often think of Debian as a bit moldy from some changes over the years with legacy support (kludges?) in place, where it seemed more like an outdated Arch Linux at some point once it had switched to systemd.

But if I were CERN, I understand the choice of not getting involved with newer forks that aren't novel distributions you can trust to be around for the long haul. I would choose Debian as well in their place.

Alma and Rocky both require x86-64-v2 CPU as a minimum (same as RHEL 9). CERN want baseline x86-64-v1 which Debian provides.

This is a dumb and inaccurate headline.

Well, those are functional clones of RHEL/CentOS and unsuitable for CERN as mentioned in the article.

RHEL is EOLing CPU architectures that CERN still relies on heavily.

> RHEL 9 mandated x86-64-v2, requiring instruction sets like SSE4.2 and POPCNT, while RHEL 10 targets x86-64-v3. CERN's accelerator infrastructure manages more than 2,200 specialised front-end computers and 17,000 embedded devices, including legacy Core 2-era and custom industrial boards, engineered for 10- to 15-year lifecycles aligned with long-term accelerator shutdown windows. Upstream microarchitecture mandates threatened to abruptly obsolete thousands of functional, purpose-built control nodes.