The real question, though, is: after a successful OS upgrade, how many of your installed apps still work without issues?
On Linux, this varies: popular source-available apps tend to do fine, whereas less-common and proprietary (not to mention expensive!) apps fail after even minor updates, with no other resolution than 'ask your app supplier to do better', which is not always an option due to said supplier being too burned-out, bankrupt, or both.
On MacOS, apps generally seem to have a 2-5 year lifetime, after which they break for various (often minor) reasons. Resolution is as per above, and often unavailable due to suppliers disappearing or giving up because of to the relatively small size of the MacOS market. iOS has similar issues.
On Windows, you can generally continue to use even the most obsolete apps for 10-20 years, and often even longer. Of course, traumatic generational changes (obsoleting DOS or 16-bit WinAPI apps) still take their toll, but compared to other operating systems, this happens a lot less often, and migration tooling is often available.
WoW64 makes 32-bit programs work under 64-bit Windows by providing an entire 32-bit copy of the 64-bit operating system, and then transparently redirecting reference calls made by 32-bit programs to them instead.
It's simple in design, brute force in execution, and practical in results. I hope Microsoft never changes their backwards compatibility philosophy; other operating system vendors should strive to be like them.
It's just crazy compared to how much software just completely breaks between different macOS releases with no recourse, or have to be recompiled and reinstalled from scratch on Linuxes. Microsoft's bad at a lot of things, but they deserve a huge amount of credit for their backward compatibility on Windows...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/overview
Edit: Seems that emulation system also uses WOW64! https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8...
That'd be impressive, since Ubuntu 1.0 doesn't exist (first version was 4.10).
It’s also worth noting certain Linux releases have extended support so you continue to get security updates without upgrading (a strategy Microsoft also uses).
Still, it is a downside of Linux and macOS compared to Windows.
Surely you lie.
Per https://www.google.com/search?q=decade+in+years, a decade is 10 years, making the above date since December 26, 2022, over a decade ago?
But possibly, per Bill Clinton, that all depends on "what the meaning of the word 'is' is"? Or I'm missing some implied sarcasm? Usually Occam's Razor would help out, but I just got downvoted twice for enumerating some historical facts on a separate thread, so who knows...
My mental model of Windows 8 is "that toc (terrible half of the cycle) windows release to 7's tic, that I had to remove from my Aunt's new laptop and found that UEFI made downgrading to Win7 a right ballache and I swear I did this 3 years ago not 10" How time flies.
Which then expectedly exploded whenever MS shipped a new Windows version.
And for apps where the out-of-the-box mitigations don't work, the inscrutably-named Assessment and Deployment Kit (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/get-start...) will most likely help you out. Sure, some truly ancient apps (mostly DOS and OG-WinAPI) really won't work anymore, but those are better relegated to a VM anyway, if only for security reasons.
If you want to understand why Windows still occupies a lot of IT mindset even in Y2K22, understanding the traditional Microsoft approach to backwards compatibility (as much demonstrated deficiencies as it has...) is a necessary first step.