Comment by tsimionescu

You seem to think that software must be a continuously updated thing, or it becomes legacy. This is somewhat true in the current world, but it is massively wasteful and unnecessary. It should be normal for software to be finished, and one should expect finished software to keep working for many years.

One huge market where this does happen is games. Disregarding the current plague of microtransaction-funded 'live experiences', most games are pieces of software that get released and are mostly done, barring some added content going out for a year or two. Losing the ability to play these games because someone has decided that ABI compatibility is kinda hard is ridiculous, and would definitely not fly for a consumer OS.

It would be interesting for someone to try to apply this same argument to hardware: would it make sense to abandon old hardware support every release? Doing this with device drivers was one of the things which hurt Linux adoption on the desktop, and hurt Windows Vista's release immensely.

Overall, end-users do not and should not care for OS updates. They are a necessary evil, to help fix bugs that the OS developers missed that threaten their security; and to be able to use new applications that rely on new OS features. But breaking old applications or hardware is a massive pain point that makes users weary of updating despite the risk to their security.