Ask Questions and Find Answers

Depends on what you mean by community support:
If it's answers to questions here: They're voluntary, unpaid and not guaranteed (but older versions still get answers - the older the version, the less experience people have with those. I.e. recently there was a 4.x question, that probably didn't get a good answer any more - but enough people here still have experience with (or memory of) 6.2
If it's updates, bugfixes, new features: I'd not expect them. Be prepared to fix any issues by yourself. There might be posts here that give instructions, but I'd just not expect any more new code.
And with regards to "support on a service level": The forums are free - you can't rely on getting an answer here. We're doing our best though. Service level is what you get with EE. And even new 6.2 EE subscriptions are no longer available, the new ones are all on Liferay DXP these days and even the premium support on Liferay 6.2 EE is ending soon.

I have to disagree. I don't know what you guys did on the path to 7.X , but I have never been able to get either the release candidates or the GA releases to run well. Usually that involves staring blankly at a little blue line racing across the top of the window and no indication in either catalina.out or the browser's javascript console what went wrong. I recently tried again and in a couple hours of just working as a user the Control Panel became unresponsive, again with no indication of anything being wrong. These sorts of problems just can't happen on a production site.

True, and they don't. There are numerous organizations already onboard the DXP bandwagon chugging happily along serving requests by the millions to users every day.

One-off anecdotes like this are mostly unheard of. It does happen to new users that need help configuring their environment, bumping up memory allocation from the default 1g to a reasonable 2g or 4g setting amongst others. It's really hard to get a good solid environment running well on a laptop, for example, vs a real production-like setup. In production, you'll have a separate DB server, a separate search server, separate tomcat, all fairly beefy systems with plenty of resources to handle the capacity needs of users. On a laptop if you don't get the balance right with enough resources to keep everything happy and prevent starvation, you can see things like this happen. Doesn't mean its your fault or Liferay's fault or ..., it just means that adding some more resources to the mix can give you a completely different outcome.

Plus the development environment got changed which means the time and effort the developer community put into learning the plugins API got tossed, theming got changed because the old tools which did exactly the same thing as the new tools weren't hip enough. Sorry but it's a mess. If the question a developer is faced with is be hip, or get the job done, I'm gonna have to opt for getting the job done with 6.2 . Sure, it's funky, but the devil you know, you know? I'll try again with the next 7.X GA release, but I'm not holding my breath.

Well, Liferay brought OSGi to the table finally, an ask that had been outstanding for awhile and was very anticipated by the CE and EE communities. That kind of change is pretty significant and explains some of the tooling changes.

At the same time, they provided a built-in upgrade assistant in the Liferay IDE. It is able to help tackle the grunt work of completing an upgrade by suggesting necessary changes to make your code compatible.

Also, although maybe it hasn't been clearly stated, upgrades do not require a complete change of packaging. As I point out in my blog, portlet wars still work and upgrades should really keep them in that format: https://web.liferay.com/web/user.26526/blog/-/blogs/how-to-upgrade-to-liferay-7-0-

Theme changes? Yes, there were a lot. But this too was driven by the industry, not by Liferay. Front end developers are now doing everything with new tools with the JS-only SPAs, SASS stylesheets, etc. Liferay didn't force the change in order to be cool, the change was demanded by the front end developers that wanted Liferay to catch up to the trends already in the industry.

I've been doing Liferay development for 10 years now. I still look back fondly to the Liferay 5 days where I only needed the extension environment, JSP portlets and jQuery for some cool UI work. But I know that the sites I was building for Liferay 5 just wouldn't stand up today. Users demand more, they want responsive design to support mobile and desktop web, they want snappy UIs that do not require full page refresh and act more like apps than web pages. Developers want current tools, not antiquated build tools like Ant from 20 years ago. Project managers and employers want to take advantage of the glut of JS developers out there to create portlets instead of trying to find the few JSP programmers that are still willing to do that work.

There are lots of folks getting the job done on Liferay 7.0 CE and Liferay 7 DXP. It is also true that there is a learning curve to move from Liferay 6.x. Honestly I believe it is easier for an inexperienced Liferay developer to learn and be productive as a Liferay 7 developer than those of us that have Liferay 6 baggage to unlearn.

Sure it is a hardship, but being in IT we should all be used to that by now. Little if anything stays unchanged in this industry from day to day or month to month or year to year. Expecting to just kick back and stick with Liferay 6.2 is really just folly.

I'd encourage you to get back on the Liferay 7 bandwagon. GA5 is out, it's better than the initial GA. Kick its tires and, if you have problems, feel free to come back here and ask, we help all the time. Same with issues on the developer learning curve; it's hard but dev.liferay.com documentation is better and you always have the forums for pointed questions...

Unless, of course, I got this all wrong and you're just trolling, then you can forget all of this and have a nice day...