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So true. I just yesterday, on a lark, took a win10 SSD from a new Dell and stuck it in a 10 year old HP, and within about a minute it booted much to my surprise.

It didn't even need to connect to the internet.

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For quite a while, Windows was the holdout. MacOS wouldn't even flinch if you moved it to another machine; Linux might have needed a little help finding its root volume or NIC but would otherwise be happy. Windows, however, would fall over with a BSOD.

Don't try that with Arch Linux. That distro lost me forever because I didn't log into a computer for six months (in 2012) and the OS was recoverably broken.

From experience, I highly doubt it was actually unrecoverable. I did something similar many times & all it takes is to read archlinux.org news section & apply .pacnew config diffs where needed. Arch is a bleeding edge distro constantly marching ahead; that's one of its primary advantages, so it's best to update regularly. That being said it is very much possible to not update for months, just requires a bit of extra care when you finally do due to the large number of accumulated changes.

I even did an online, in place switchover from SysV to systemd in 2011 and despite that being a scary amount of changes at once still got a working system.

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