[ftaghn]

> For those unaware, Linux has a very explicit policy of never breaking userspace

But has no qualm with constantly refactoring the kernel side of the coin for the most minor of reasons, which causes endless trouble when it comes to supporting out of tree drivers and is the true reason why Android will never be able to provide long term support. SOC manufacturers are not interested in the churn involved in updating their drivers to support the newer kernels that come with new android versions. Most often, it's because they want to keep their driver proprietary, but it is not the only reason, there is a cold hard truth about the nature of the market: new phones are released at a high cadence, while the process of mainlining a driver into upstream linux kernel is arduous, depending on the attitudes of kernel maintainers, truly painful, and no company out there could see any value in waiting for this process to end before releasing their hardware onto the market. Since they're already going to make it out of tree and release it as is, why would they bother? a year later, they'll repeat this process again, and again. Then Android updates, and the devices are obsoleted.

On the other hand, you can install the latest GPU driver on Windows 10 just fine, and it is the same driver as the one on 11. Windows doesn't constantly break your not-maintained-by-microsoft drivers with newer versions of their kernel.

[rstat1]

For the part that most people care about (which is the userspace side, that comes from the Mesa Project) you can freely update it to whatever is the latest version without really having to care about the kernel side. The only point at which the kernel side of the GPU equation actually matters for Mesa is when new HW comes out.

>>you can install the latest GPU driver on Windows 10 just fine, and it is the same driver as the one on 11

MS is certainly well known for breaking Windows drivers across major releases. The only reason that Win10 and 11 driver is the same is because Win10 and 11 are more or less the same thing.

[kmeisthax]

To put a finer point on driver breakages... part of why Vista was so disastrously bad at launch was specifically because they'd drastically changed the DirectX kernel driver model to support DWM[0]. Nvidia in particular was responsible for a third of all Vista crashes, with another third being ATI (now AMD RTG). WDDM was a moving target right up until launch and it took about a year for Vista to actually be usable[1].

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...

[1] A year afterwards of trying to convince people that Vista was good now (which it was), Microsoft threw up their hands and released Windows 7.

[Dalewyn]

>MS is certainly well known for breaking Windows drivers across major releases. The only reason that Win10 and 11 driver is the same is because Win10 and 11 are more or less the same thing.

Not quite accurate, it depends on whether a new version of Windows has a significantly newer kernel.

Windows 2000 and Windows XP (and all its derivatives) share the NT5.x kernel, and thus drivers for any of them generally work in the others. Likewise Windows Vista/7/8/8.1 which all share the NT6.x kernel, and Windows 10 and 11 which share the NT10.0 kernel.