Divorcing the OS from the hardware means stuff just lasts far, far longer. Like just a few years ago it became impossible to run 32bit windows which effectivel

Divorcing the OS from the hardware means stuff just lasts far, far longer. Like just a few years ago it became impossible to run 32bit windows which effectively killed all OS software updates for hardware older than ~2005. Most application software followed. On the Linux they just dropped support for the 486 and older versions of the kernel will likely still get security updates for a while.