chips like Intel’s old Core 2 Duo, which comprises about 47 percent of their fleet
That’s just a crazy number and I was not aware how dated their systems were. On the other hand, never touch a running system.
The LHC was completed in 08. That chip was sold from 06 to 12. This means basically half the pc’s they bought ~15 years ago are still meeting their needs.
Honestly, this is the way it should be. The only reason most enterprises upgrade their computers is because Microslop, and all the other proprietary software they’ve allowed themselves to grow dependent on, require it; not because a 20 year old computer isn’t snappy on Debian, or isn’t powerful enough for email, docs, and browsing. The LHC requires supercomputers and server farms for primary operations. These pc’s are basically just thin clients to access those resources.
There are still a shocking amount of Windows XP and 7 systems in production, because the software stack doesn’t need to be updated. If those systems had been deployed on linux 20 years ago, they would still be fully capable of receiving security updates.
The reason is old hardware support:
The reason for all that was a compiler flag. When Red Hat builds RHEL, it picks a minimum CPU generation the software will run on. RHEL 9’s cutoff already excludes CERN’s oldest boards, the kind running chips like Intel’s old Core 2 Duo, which comprises about 47 percent of their fleet.
RHEL 10 raises that cutoff again, and this time even newer Ivy Bridge-generation boards, another 17 percent, fall on the wrong side of it.
as a Debian user: I wish they had chosen a distro that didn’t just decide to accept slop contributions.
