Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 16th Jan 2012 22:55 UTC
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Member since:
2005-07-06
[ snip ] meaningless cliche, popular among advocates of non-Windows OSes, that unfortunately, doesn't really bear close inspection.
I don't think that cliche is as meaningless as you make it out to be. Win32 is the most stable API in existence, but MS has and does muck about with their driver model every few years. (That Windows XP was as long lived as it was, is just an abberation.) I've seen quite a few pieces of hardware "die" along the way (from Win 9x to Windows 7), just because the driver model in Windows had changed and the device vendor opted not to port the driver for economical reasons. While most programs (except for low level system tools) seem to survive quite nicely between versions, it isn't all milk and honey in the Windows camp either.
Doesn't exonerate Linux (distros) for sometimes seemingly needless churn. But your demands for 5 + years stability is a bit unrealistic. Not even MS has that in the cards for ordinairy mortals.
Consumer, Hardware, and Multimedia products
Microsoft will offer Mainstream Support for either a minimum of 5 years from the date of a product’s general availability, or for 2 years after the successor product (N+1) is released, whichever is longer. Extended Support is not offered for Consumer, Hardware, and Multimedia products. http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy
The devil here is the 2 years after the successor product (N+1) is released. MS is ramping up development speed again, after the Longhorn disaster. So you'll get 5 years at best and most likely 4 years at worst. This is for consumer versions of course. They do treat businesses better.