It's kind of off topic so this'll be my last comment about it but I accept your point that backwards compatibility means running old software on a new OS. I was

It's kind of off topic so this'll be my last comment about it but I accept your point that backwards compatibility means running old software on a new OS. I was incorrect. It has been a very, very long time since I've run into hardware that I had any incentive to install vendor provided drivers for in order to get a computer running with Linux, with the exception of VMWare kernel modules and NVidia drivers, but Nvidia cards still run with noveau so the computer will still work so that you can get the proprietary drivers. And VMWare is proprietary software, so that's no surprise. I just have not done it for actual hardware other than Nvidia graphics cards in at least a decade. Maybe I've gotten lucky in the hardware I've bought or something, but I haven't had any drivers broken badly enough that I even would file a bug report except for my Nvidia proprietary driver that is buggy as heck. But I accept that my experience is also an anecdote.