Scientific Linux

What do you like best?

Scientific Linux is a freely maintained variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The best thing with scientific linux is it's maintained to a specific version and hardly updates frequently. So, once a researcher learns to use it they can keep up their work progress on same distribution. It helps the researcher group keep track of programming within the same OS. Once a team starts working on their project it is cumbersome to keep changing OS and fix programming errors just for the sake of OS and it's updates.

What do you dislike?

The educational community is closed door sometimes. And researchers are few in numbers compared to the vast distributions and variants of Linux OS.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Do not use it as a desktop or laptop day to day working station.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

My friends use Scientific Linux in their lab for free. That is the best reason for using Scientific Linux on 1000 nodes for programming purpose. Educational institutes and research labs are low on IT budgets, so to keep their code sharing and running in other institutes it is used.