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Comment by inferiorhuman | Hacker News Reader

6 years may seem like a long time, but check out what the competition is doing. Oracle is supporting Solaris 10 for 20 years, 11.4 for 16 years (23 years if you lump it in with 11.0). HP-UX 11i versions seem to get around 15 years of support.

It really depends on what you're doing, a lot of industries may not need such long-term support. 6 years seems like a happy medium to me, but then again I'm not the one supporting it. I expect the kernel devs would be singing a different tune if people were willing to pay for that extended support.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/276jjn0uo...

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Are those really competition anymore?

They're just legacy now IMO and their long term support requirements are a result of this, companies that haven't gotten rid of them by now aren't likely to do it any time soon.

I hate seeing them go. I wasn't such a fan of Solaris but I was of HP-UX. But its days are over. It doesn't even run on x86 or x64 and HP has been paying Intel huge money to keep itanium on life support, which is running out now if it hasn't already.

At least Solaris had an Intel port but it too is very rare now.

Theres a lot of people who haven't got rid of old Linux systems these days too. RHEL 6 from 2010 is still eligible for extended support.

There's still a decent population of RHEL 5 systems in the wild. Last year I was offered an engagement (turned down for a few reasons) to help a company upgrade several hundred systems from RHEL 5 to RHEL 6 and start planning for a future rollout of RHEL 7.

Outside of tech focused companies, 10+ year old systems really are the norm.

> Outside of tech focused companies, 10+ year old systems really are the norm.

It's because outside of tech companies, nobody cares about new features. They care about things continuing to work. Companies don't buy software for the fun of exploring new versions, especially frustratingly pointless cosmetic changes that keep hitting their training budgets.

Many companies would be happy with RHEL5 or Windows XP today from a feature standpoint, if it weren't a security vulnerability.

The problem about "things continuing to work" is really that many security fixes require updated architecture too. This is really why it's so hard to do LTS. It's not only about wanting new features.

What feature did they need in el7 that wasn't there in el9 ? What was their logic ?

At megacorp (years ago) we were transitioning to CentOS 7 (from 6) and just starting to wind down our 32-bit windows stuff in AWS. I'm sure there are plenty of legacy Linux systems out there, but I wonder how many folks are actually paying for them.

CentOS/RHEL 6 was already pretty long in the tooth, but being the contrarian I am, I was not looking forward to the impending systemd nonsense.

> At megacorp (years ago) we were transitioning to CentOS 7 (from 6)...

Today at work, we finally got the OK to stop supporting CentOS 7, for new releases.

It’s nightmare for developers if you get stuck with infrastructure on such dinosaurs and need to deploy a fresh new project. Anything made in the last 3-5 years likely won’t build due to at least openssl even if you get it to otherwise compile. Docker may not run. Postgres may not run. Go binaries? Yeah those also have issues. It’s like putting yourself into a time capsule with unbreakable windows - you can see how much progress has been made and how much easier your life could’ve been, but you’re stuck here.

Old systems are stable, but there’s a fine line between that and stagnation. Tread carefully.

That is common workday in enterprise consulting.

Most of our .NET workloads are still for .NET Framework, and only now we are starting to have Java 17 for new projects, and only thanks to projects like Spring pushing for it.

Ah, and C++ will most likely be a mix of C++14 and C++17, for new projects.

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