CERN moves thousands of accelerator control computers to Debian

CERN is moving several thousand computers that control its particle accelerator hardware from Red Hat-family Linux distros to Debian.

CERN – the place that runs the Large Hadron Collider – generates a lot of data, and that means it uses a lot of computers. Most of them run Linux, and for over 20 years, it used distros in the Red Hat family. Now, that's beginning to change: it’s moving what it calls the “front end” computers, the ones underground that control the LHC, over to Debian Linux.

At the end of last month, the MiniDebConf Winterthur 2026 was held in Switzerland, and two CERN engineers, Federico Vaga and Nikos Tsipinakis, gave a talk about Controlling CERN’s Accelerators with Debian. In a dense 40 minutes, they talked about the size and complexity of CERN’s computer systems and the many problems with moving some of them from the Red Hat...

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