[brandonmenc]

> Consider an appliance that will be shipped to a literal cave

This.

A decade ago I was technical co-founder of a company [0] that made interactive photo booths and I chose CentOS for the OS.

There are some out in the wild still working and powered on 24/7 and not a peep from any of them.

We only ever did a few manual updates early on - after determining that the spotty, expensive cellular wasn't worth wasting on non-security updates - so most of them are running whatever version was out ten years ago.

Rock solid.

[0] https://sooh.com