askchapo

I think Debian is "standard" enough to be a good choice for scientific applications. Debian was an early advocate of Reproducable Builds and has waged an arduous campaign towards ensuring as many of its packages are in compliance as possible. Determinism is a very appealing characteristic for scientists. There also is a Debian Science initiative with subgroups focused on maintaining packages for various disciplines. I haven't used Debian for anything really sciency, but it's renowned stability, long release cycle, and aforementioned initiatives make it a pretty good choice.

Another distribution which is worth consideration is Guix. Guix is quite a bit more complex to get started with, but it extends the idea of reproducible builds beyond individual packages, to encompass installation and configuration of all software on the system. The idea with Guix is that you put together a recipe for what software goes in your system and how it's configured, and from that recipe it will produce an identical system each time. This allows you to build up and tear down environments at will in a completely deterministic and automated fashion, rather than manually installing, configuring, and updating software as a sequence of manual, potentially error-prone actions. Guix is very similar to the (more popular) NixOS distribution, which would be a good choice for the same reasons, but for whatever reason I've seen a higher concentration of science people around Guix.

Personally I use Gentoo. Gentoo is probably not a great choice for scientific applications due to the sheer amount of variables introduced by Portage. None the less, it packages a number of nice programs for things like CAD, Finite Element Method, Computational Fluid Analysis, Astronomy, GIS, amateur radio, etc. So, you should be able to get going on just about any mature distribution. You just might take particular interest in Debian or Guix if you are primarily using your machine for scientific applications.