For many old windows games (and probably other apps) you'll actually have better luck running them on linux than a modern version of windows, thanks to wine/proton.

E.g. see this user report: https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/1743cec/almost_s...

Pretty much.

For the sake of nostalgia, I downloaded an Encarta 2000 ISO form Internet Archive, then spun up a Windows 98 VM to run it on but that VM had a lot of sound issues in Virtual Box, then I realized that Encarta would also run just fine installed on Windows 11 lol.

This kind of backwards compatibility is not something I need on a daily basis but it's pretty neat that I can just run very old SW on my main OS without fiddling with VMs.

This is not 100% true. Some legacy Windows software does not run on current Windows. Never got Slave Zero running on Windows XP or Windows 2000 after upgrading from Windows 98 & ME. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Zero

In context, it looks like they meant software updates, which is closer to what your calling hardware support.

I looked into it. Consumer installs of Windows 10 have updates until 2025.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10#Support_lifecycle