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Comment by esalman | Hacker News Reader

Tbh I don't share the sentiment that the community appreciates long SW support. Otherwise we'd see Windows being recommended over Linux more often.

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This is more about device support for updated OS, which any PC does. Especially with Linux, unlike Windows 11 that can't be installed on older PCs without some hacks.

You mean Microsoft Windows which dropped support for Zen 1 with Win11 not even 5 years after Zen 1 was released? Meanwhile, Linux will still run on a 30+ year old CPU...

Isn't Windows 10 still supported?

I looked into it. Consumer installs of Windows 10 have updates until 2025.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10#Support_lifecycle

They said software support, not hardware support.

You can take a win 95 gui app and run it on windows 10 without issue. You can’t do the same on Linux.

Pretty much.

For the sake of nostalgia, I downloaded an Encarta 2000 ISO form Internet Archive, then spun up a Windows 98 VM to run it on but that VM had a lot of sound issues in Virtual Box, then I realized that Encarta would also run just fine installed on Windows 11 lol.

This kind of backwards compatibility is not something I need on a daily basis but it's pretty neat that I can just run very old SW on my main OS without fiddling with VMs.

In context, it looks like they meant software updates, which is closer to what your calling hardware support.

This is not 100% true. Some legacy Windows software does not run on current Windows. Never got Slave Zero running on Windows XP or Windows 2000 after upgrading from Windows 98 & ME. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Zero

For many old windows games (and probably other apps) you'll actually have better luck running them on linux than a modern version of windows, thanks to wine/proton.

E.g. see this user report: https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/1743cec/almost_s...

Windows 10 support continues until October of 2025. Zen 1 will be 8 years old at that point.

It’s pretty much guaranteed that Microsoft will add an extended support period to windows 10. Windows 7 just left extended support last year.

It's really not the same kind of support. We get plenty of active support and development in the Linux world, and open source more broadly.

Windows only offers essential life support, trying to ensure that something written 20 years ago still runs today, despite being completely abandoned for 19 years with no reasonable way of fixing it.

Lol, I guess Linux did just drop 386 and 486 a couple years ago.

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