Windows has much better forward and backward compatibility than Linux, that’s why 10 year old Windows is still fine. 10 year old Linux on the other side just means nothing modern will work on it. That’s really only usable in extreme edge cases. Flatpak and Snap somewhat address this, but that also puts you back into the forced-upgrade treadmill, as Flatpak runtimes don’t have LTS support (not sure how Snap handles this).
Windows has much better forward and backward compatibility than Linux, that’s why 10 year old Windows is still fine. 10 year old Linux on the other side just means nothing modern will work on it. That’s really only usable in extreme edge cases. Flatpak and Snap somewhat address this, but that also puts you back into the forced-upgrade treadmill, as Flatpak runtimes don’t have LTS support (not sure how Snap handles this).