I think part of that perception is a general confusion of OS releases and distros, specially if comparing with windows.
I think that is only the case of the 10+ years of a windows install because it is the same windows version. Windows until I think “recently” didn’t even have OS upgrade, I know that now people can upgrade from win10 to win11 (and maybe that was also the case for win8) but even that is because MS wants to force a new version on people and there is a lot of complaints of the upgrade breaking the OS .
On Linux a lot of distros do try to upgrade to a new version and it a very complicated problem. Some distros support this better than others.
But if you are saying that you have like a win7 install rock solid for 10 years, the equivalent is a Linux distro with LTS support centOS, and these distros are rock solid and different than windows it will not get slow over time.
I’ve had problems with just regular package upgrades. Also to be fair, Windows does have service packs which can add significant new OS features without updating to a whole other version, so it’s not like Windows XP/Vista/7/10/11 stay the exact same from when you install them.
Plus the irony is that a lot of the features in this meme have to do with Wayland, and I can’t find many LTS releases that even use it? It’ll take years before these features are included in releases that aren’t bleeding edge and will still require a whole OS reinstall to actually get them.
I think part of that perception is a general confusion of OS releases and distros, specially if comparing with windows.
I think that is only the case of the 10+ years of a windows install because it is the same windows version. Windows until I think “recently” didn’t even have OS upgrade, I know that now people can upgrade from win10 to win11 (and maybe that was also the case for win8) but even that is because MS wants to force a new version on people and there is a lot of complaints of the upgrade breaking the OS .
On Linux a lot of distros do try to upgrade to a new version and it a very complicated problem. Some distros support this better than others.
But if you are saying that you have like a win7 install rock solid for 10 years, the equivalent is a Linux distro with LTS support centOS, and these distros are rock solid and different than windows it will not get slow over time.
I’ve had problems with just regular package upgrades. Also to be fair, Windows does have service packs which can add significant new OS features without updating to a whole other version, so it’s not like Windows XP/Vista/7/10/11 stay the exact same from when you install them.
Plus the irony is that a lot of the features in this meme have to do with Wayland, and I can’t find many LTS releases that even use it? It’ll take years before these features are included in releases that aren’t bleeding edge and will still require a whole OS reinstall to actually get them.