Linux drivers can work for much longer than a decade once they reach mainline. Out of tree drivers are another story.

Right, but Windows drivers are (all?) out of tree and have been for decades; they'll never get every vendor to change that.

And this story that windows drivers work forever is a rosy tinted view of the world. Many drivers (my ltc scanner) stopped working working from win9x to xp. I saw an USB projector driver break when a system was updated from win 7 to 8. The same device worked as a fb device out of the box on my rockpi4. And windows drivers are platfrom dependent, the same driver will nit work on 32/64 systems or arm/x86. Linux is entirely another world.

I recently installed XP drivers on a Windows 10 system. Worked flawlessly, even though officially this wasn't supported. 9x to XP/Vista is the last breaking change we've seen and that was over 15 years ago. It's quite impressive actually.

I've got an Asus CP120 USB mini projector. When you plug it on a windows machine it presents itself as a mass storage device with the windows 7 (or xp, I don't remember) driver on it. Last time I tested, it didn't worked out of the box on a windows 10 machine; it would probably work if drivers were downloaded and installed, but I didn't bother.

On my rockpi4, I simply plugged it and instantly I've got a terminal on my wall. It is an ARM machine. That's the HUGE advantage of having a driver in the kernel: it will work on every architecture the code can compile. That was just the same experience with my usb wifi dongle, with my wacom tablet, with an epson multifunctional (I had to apt-get install escpr, but it is a single command), samsung printers... Some of these drivers are in user-space and not in the kernel, but it worked flawlessly in more than a single arch. That is impressive.

But I do admit I envy the number of drivers for desktop gadgets that are compatible with windows. Of course, binary drivers are only interesting you use a single arch.

Mainline drivers are maintained and updated, I think the statement you are replying to is short hand for “windows binary drivers work for years across kernel versions and minor distribution version”

The windows driver model is not semantically much different. There is greater cohesion at a higher level, leading to it being easier to create a shim layer for, if anything.

DKMS and driver segmentation enables 10 year old drivers to mostly still work on Linux too.

Yes. Sometimes those old drivers can't be compiled with newer headers.

And sometimes old drivers won't work on Windows 10.

any example of a decade old driver that will install? not even the .cat signature algorithm will be the same, and windows enforces signed drivers these days.

Can NDISwrapper approach be applied to other drivers?