We've got a couple of operating system alerts for those of you looking to buy new computers or update existing Mac or Linux machines:
SBGrid is not compatible with MacOS 10.15 "Catalina without a work-around for recent filesystem changes", the next version of Apple's MacOS due out in October with significant changes. With Catalina, Apple will enforce strict filesystem controls that will break SBGrid installations. They have also dropped support for 32-bit binaries that many older applications require. We strongly recommend against upgrading to 10.15 on any Mac with SBGrid software. A solution is in the works, but it may take some time before we can fully implement the changes to officially support 10.15. We are also compiling a list of 32-bit software applications that will not be available after machines are updated to version 10.15. Please see https://sbgrid.org/wiki/catalina for more info.
CentOS 8 support coming soon: CentOS 8 was released on 9/24 and we are testing SBGrid with plans to add support for this Linux distribution in the near future. We are not there yet, so hold off on those updates for now, but we expect the transition to be relatively smooth. With the addition of support for CentOS 8, we will move our build pipeline to CentOS 7 and begin phasing out support for new titles on CentOS 6.