I disagree that it’s more similar to service packs. Debian has dropped entire architectures at some releases, and they frequently break binary (and sometimes source) compatibility, far more frequently than service packs do. Hardware compatibility breakage is pretty common between releases too.
It’s probably true that Microsoft changes more between releases, but if you installed Debian on your 32-bit big endian MIPS hardware, you needed to switch to a different OS or buy new hardware when they drop support for Buster.
I suppose it’s true for very old or more exotic hardware.
Since last year we can’t even run Linux on i486 CPUs, and it’s not even some relatively exotic architecture!
I disagree that it’s more similar to service packs. Debian has dropped entire architectures at some releases, and they frequently break binary (and sometimes source) compatibility, far more frequently than service packs do. Hardware compatibility breakage is pretty common between releases too.
It’s probably true that Microsoft changes more between releases, but if you installed Debian on your 32-bit big endian MIPS hardware, you needed to switch to a different OS or buy new hardware when they drop support for Buster.
I suppose it’s true for very old or more exotic hardware.
Since last year we can’t even run Linux on i486 CPUs, and it’s not even some relatively exotic architecture!