Hello fellow nixers,
All things will die someday, this is inevitable. However it has always been a thing in software hardware development to put on a certain date when the company/entity will drop support for it, or even in some cases force users to switch to newer solutions. Sometimes it goes under the term of Long Term Support and End of Life Support, other time it goes by the name of Planned Obsolescence or Built-In Obsolescence.

And here comes the subject of this thread: I've seen a lot of machines being thrown away for no good reasons other than that it's not supported anymore and I've seen a lot of other machines being brought back to life by some sort of Unix-like OS or by fetching from somewhere a similar version of the OS maintained by some stranger on the internet. There's a lot of keeping alive both of software and of hardware, the Unix community seems like the one that keeps this to heart more than any other.

What is your opinion on the topic of long term support and keeping alive software and hardware in general.


Here's mine: I find it fascinating that you can run old school software and that it's still being actively studied and worked on. You won't have to worry about things such as a digital dark age when the format of files is lost and they can't be read anymore (well some roff stuffs are still being deciphered but still it's all text).

And as far as hardware is related there's really a flexibility of choices and how much you can calibrate the "heaviness" of what's being installed. The old machines can still run fine and be brought to life while having the latest security patches. Maybe they won't be able to run the latest browser but they're not thrown away.

While on the other side of things, there are a lot, maybe too much, fanaticism about those old softwares and their descendants. The whole backward compatibility that accumulates over time also accumulates in a persons brain.

So nixers, what do you think of the relation between Unix and supporting older machines and softwares.