[salamander014]

Using physical hardware for as long as possible is absolutely the right mindset. For cost, reliability, environmental reasons, and many more.

This post was about an operating system (Software).

People shouldn't be using code that is no longer supported (support it yourself or don't use it, it's dangerous).

And people should be rebuilding their infrastructure from scratch as often as possible. That's the only way to prove you've built something reliable, auditable, and correct.

VMs and containers make that very easy and achievable for even the smallest of teams.

Linux goes to great lengths to support lots of different (and old) hardware. Linus has said many times, if you maintain it, it can stay.

[dnautics]

Maybe moving forward that's true as efficiency hits limits, but you really shouldn't use old hardware if the new hardware so outstrips it's efficiency that switching to the new hardware amortizes the cost of the new hardware plus the cost to decommission the old hardware

[icedchai]

In the real world you see companies running the same old unpatched distro for years. I had a contract job at a company that hadn’t updated one of its systems in over 3 years. Several systems with 1200+ day uptimes. Nobody wanted to update anything since it might break. Even a reboot was frowned upon. This was at a “real company” with 1000’s of employees and a huge IT staff. Truly sad.