I’m in the same situation, and I recently had started to plan on upgrading a small HPC cluster from CentOS 7. Before today, I had planned on CentOS 8.
Now? “¯\_(ツ)_/¯“ Probably Debian.
I’ve always used CentOS for clusters, but part of the reason for that is that there are some research packages that support RPM installation, but not deb. At least this gas historically been the case.
If a large amount (maybe even a majority) of users have to switch away from CentOS and RPM packaging, I think we’ll see an acceleration away from RPM as a default option.
So, in that way, I think we do matter, but just not on the balance sheet.
Now? “¯\_(ツ)_/¯“ Probably Debian.
I’ve always used CentOS for clusters, but part of the reason for that is that there are some research packages that support RPM installation, but not deb. At least this gas historically been the case.
If a large amount (maybe even a majority) of users have to switch away from CentOS and RPM packaging, I think we’ll see an acceleration away from RPM as a default option.
So, in that way, I think we do matter, but just not on the balance sheet.