Right now I'm running mostly rhel7/centos7/rhel6/rhel5 servers for our development needs. We run a lot of GCC, Matlab, specific vendor softwares and we are starting to run docker and our cluster runs a bit of everything in term of jobs. I guess I will stick to rhel7/centos7 for the servers.
My concern is with the desktops. I've tried to keep it as close as possible to the servers for compatibility reasons and I'm running rhel7/centos7 on them. But often I'm asked for ubuntu instead. More and more projects are dependent on ubuntu and even if we can add libraries to rhel I'm starting to wonder if the cost of keeping rhel7 on a desktop (old kernel, old python, license) is justified. Ubuntu seems to be the distribution that newcomer expect to find on a desktop.
In addition, more and more people just use their (private) laptop and connect to the server with ssh. If I add containers to the mix then keeping attached to a specific OS/library for development becomes irrelevant. So I'm guessing: why not just give them the distro with the most recent drivers and the best UI experience, then show them how to develop in a container similar to our cluster/servers. Does it make sense to you? How do you operate?
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