Ask HN: Linux Ecosystem's Backwards Compatibility

Before everthing, this is not about Linux's excellent backwards compatibilty itself, but on other components of the ecosystem. While I appreciate Torvalds et al.'s efforts to not break the userspace, I don't feel that extends on to its ecosystem, for example GNOME and KDE has significant changes over the years, X is being deprecated to Wayland and some distirbutions have changed their network toolkit to summarize a few. While it is stopgapped by some solutions (for example Flatpak and Snap, containers like Docker), why does the ecosystem is less stable than say FreeBSD or Windows (which do have some minor changes but the chance that your software will work without changes is higher)?