About 18 years ago I wrote an internal intranet application for someone in PHP (yuck). This runs one of their core business processes. Every 3 years we do a review of the system, replace the hardware and update the software. This is exactly where CentOS variants sit for me. The last two upgrade cycles, the computer has not been down at all in the interim. It has literally been up for 3 years. The only changes have been to support later versions of Postgres and PHP and to move the backups to S3 rather than tape.

Why not the cloud? The company is in a rural location with a shitty internet connection and 50 users. When initially provisioned there was no internet connection at all!

There’s a lot of stuff which is in the territory of “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” and that’s where these distributions sit. That may cover industrial, office, line of business apps, temporarily connected or fully offline systems. Or just stuff you don’t want to piss around with.

Also never underestimate the power of having stuff you don’t have to touch or even go near. When was the last time you got paid monthly to do something once every three years?