[HN Gopher] SUSE upgrades its distros with 19 years of support -...
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       SUSE upgrades its distros with 19 years of support - no other Linux
       comes close
        
       Author : CrankyBear
       Score  : 34 points
       Date   : 2024-06-20 20:06 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.zdnet.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.zdnet.com)
        
       | repelsteeltje wrote:
       | 19 years!!
       | 
       | So imagine - you're relying on some piece of software released
       | around 2005. 2.6.10 Linux kernel, ext2 (maybe reiserfs?) TLS is
       | called SSL and you're good if your DSA key has 512 bits... This
       | essential service your company needs had long been abandoned and
       | _all_ attempts to mitigate the imminent disaster have failed.
       | (Migrate to competitor, revive the code base, run in a VM)
       | 
       | ... Or some CTO has _seriously_ done a bad job anticipating
       | whatever maintenance necessary over last decade.
       | 
       | I appreciate that change is hard sometimes, but maaaan life is so
       | much easier if you upgrade/migrate/rebuild every now and then
       | with some frequency.
        
         | fffrantz wrote:
         | Well, I'm still running critical services on Solaris 10
         | everyday and will be running them for the foreseeable future.
         | Granted it's on an airtight network, but still, every time I
         | see CDE, I'm brought back 15 years ago.
         | 
         | I wish we could migrate to something more modern, but vendor
         | lock-in is strong in certain instances, let alone in the
         | embedded space.
        
           | yeuxardents wrote:
           | Solaris 10 with zones was amazing, I miss it.
        
         | Retric wrote:
         | Not everything is online.
         | 
         | If you're operating critical infrastructure like a sewage
         | treatment plant sometimes you just want stuff to work as long
         | as possible without messing with it.
        
           | jacobgkau wrote:
           | The point is that you're probably going to have to mess with
           | it eventually, and the amount of work that takes goes up the
           | longer you put it off.
           | 
           | If you're talking a completely offline system that's
           | basically a utility and doesn't even need security patches,
           | then how many years of support the OS provides becomes
           | irrelevant, because you theoretically don't need those
           | patches anyway.
           | 
           | But if you're concerned with staying "technically up-to-
           | date," as in "the vendor says it's supported even though it's
           | X years old," then there will almost certainly come a time
           | when you reach the end of the line and have to reconcile that
           | with everything you didn't keep up with. (It might be after
           | you're out of there, though.)
        
         | bawolff wrote:
         | > TLS is called SSL
         | 
         | SSL was renamed to TLS in 1999...
        
         | ysofunny wrote:
         | I'm thinking I'd actually prefer that for a air-gapped
         | industrial control computer.
         | 
         | using USB thumb drives to move csv data into the real world
         | where there's internet
        
       | jmclnx wrote:
       | Good for them, many companies would want this. Will be
       | interesting to see if it helps the Company. If so, I would expect
       | others would join.
        
       | philips wrote:
       | I started my career on the SUSE kernel team in 2007. And I used
       | to joke that I maintained Kernel versions that were released
       | before I even started writing kernel code in high school in 2001.
       | 
       | It was really exciting and sort of daunting testing and releasing
       | kernels with Ethernet drivers I fixed to European air traffic
       | control and stock exchanges.
       | 
       | Anyways. Sort of funny to think maybe code I touched right out of
       | college is still in production and just got a life extension.
        
       | ltbarcly3 wrote:
       | This is because the companies that still use SUSE are so
       | technologically backwards and incompetent that there is no hope
       | they can ever upgrade anything, so instead they just keep paying
       | SUSE's owners for support and dig the hole deeper.
       | 
       | The last time I saw someone adopting SUSE was around 2007 (and it
       | was already a joke), which is 17 years ago... checks out.
        
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       (page generated 2024-06-20 23:01 UTC)