5-10 years is not unreasonable expected support I think.
And if you are someone manufacturing physical equipment be it CNC machine or vehicle lift hiring entire team to keep Linux patched and making your own releases seems pretty unreasonable and waste of resources. In the end anything you choose is not error free. And the box running software is not main product.
This is actually huge challenge. Finding vendor that can deliver you a box where to run software with promised long term support, when the support is actually more than just few years.
Also I don't understand how it is any more acceptable to run unpatched Linux in networked environment than it is Windows. These are very often not just stand-alone things, but instead connected to at least local network if not larger networks. With possible internet connections too. So not updating vulnerabilities is as unacceptable as it would be with Windows.
With CNC there is place for something like Windows OS. You have separate embedded system running the tools. But you still want a different piece managing the "programs". As you could have dozens or hundreds of these. And at that point reading them from network starts once again make sense. Time of dealing with floppies is over...
And with checkouts, you want more UI than just buttons. And Windows CE has been reasonably effective tool in that.
Linux is nice on servers, but often with embedded side keeping it secure and up to date is massive amount of pain. Windows does offer excellent stability and long term support. And you can just simply buy a computer with sufficient support from MS. One could ask why do not not massive companies run their own Linux distributions?
> 5-10 years is not unreasonable expected support I think.
A couple of years ago, I helped a small business with an embroidery machine that runs Windows 98. Its physical computer died, and the owner could not find the spare parts. Fortunately, it used a parallel port to control the embroidery hardware, so it was easy to move to a VM with a USB parallel port adapter.
That was very lucky then. USB parallel ports adapters are only intended to work with printers. They fail with any hardware that does custom signalling over the parallel port.
Maybe you want your lift to be able to diagnose itself. Tell possible faults, instead of spending man hours on troubleshooting every part each time downtime included. With big lifts there are many parts that could go wrong. Being able to identify which one saves lot of time and time is money.
These sort of outages are actually extremely rare nowadays. Considering how long these control systems have been kept around must mean that they are not actually causing that many issue that replacing them would be worth it.
And if you are someone manufacturing physical equipment be it CNC machine or vehicle lift hiring entire team to keep Linux patched and making your own releases seems pretty unreasonable and waste of resources. In the end anything you choose is not error free. And the box running software is not main product.
This is actually huge challenge. Finding vendor that can deliver you a box where to run software with promised long term support, when the support is actually more than just few years.
Also I don't understand how it is any more acceptable to run unpatched Linux in networked environment than it is Windows. These are very often not just stand-alone things, but instead connected to at least local network if not larger networks. With possible internet connections too. So not updating vulnerabilities is as unacceptable as it would be with Windows.
With CNC there is place for something like Windows OS. You have separate embedded system running the tools. But you still want a different piece managing the "programs". As you could have dozens or hundreds of these. And at that point reading them from network starts once again make sense. Time of dealing with floppies is over...
And with checkouts, you want more UI than just buttons. And Windows CE has been reasonably effective tool in that.
Linux is nice on servers, but often with embedded side keeping it secure and up to date is massive amount of pain. Windows does offer excellent stability and long term support. And you can just simply buy a computer with sufficient support from MS. One could ask why do not not massive companies run their own Linux distributions?