Am I crazy in thinking that the shop I was in that has CentOS 3 running their self checkouts should have a more up to date and currently supported OS? These are brand new self checkouts (the shop has had them for about a year now, but you get my point.)
It’s a genuine question. Am I wrong in thinking that using this OS on a self checkout is a terrible idea? (FWIW this shop is an international retailer)
I have no stake in the shop or anything. I just happened to be there when they had to reboot a self checkout and I noticed the OS version as I was going by.
It's likely CentOS 7.9, which was released in Nov. 2020 and shipped with kernel version 3.10.0-1160. It's not completely ridiculous for a one year old POS systems to have a four year old OS. Design for those systems probably started a few years ago, when CentOS 7.9 was relatively recent. For an embedded system the bias would have been toward an established and mature OS, and CentOS 8.x was likely considered "too new" at the time they were speccing these systems. Remotely upgrading between major releases would not be advisable in an embedded system. The RHEL/CentOS in-place upgrade story is... not great. There was zero support for in-place upgrade until RHEL/CentOS 7, and it's still considered "at your own risk" (source).
For many, CentOS7 is the last version of it because CentOS8 is now something different—they swapped it from being downstream from RHEL to essentially being the RHEL beta branch
CentOS 7 was already approaching end of life a few years ago, and it's dead now. There are reasons not to use CentOS 8 or its enterprise counterparts, but this is still very old software for a supposedly new-ish system.
I never really got why manufacturers like these went for CentOS when Ubuntu exists. You get the same level of support, with the same packages if you really want that SELinux experience, except you can actually upgrade between versions.