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.
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.
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.
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.
