The price for that kind of backwards compatibility is a literal army of engineers working for a global megacorporation. Free software could not manage that, so having a pragmatic way to keep software running in isolated containers seems like a great solution to me.
There’s an army of developers working on Linux as well, employed by companies like IBM and Oracle. I don’t see a huge difference to Microsoft here to be honest.
You'd have a better time working with Windows 7 than a 2.x Linux kernel. I love Linux, but Microsoft has longer support Windows for its operating systems.
