Yes there is. Windows can restart it's graphics drivers of they crash for example. And it has a stable driver ABI so companies can actually release closed source or out-of-tree drivers in a sane way.
Linux just assumes that all drivers must be perfect with no bugs, and must be open source and distributed with Linux itself. That's just not realistic.
Upgrading Windows from 7 to 10 caused s lot of older devices to stop working for a lot of people, despite the stable ABI; in most cases, it was just driver unavailability and not incompatibility, but that’s a distinction without a difference for most users.
Linux just keeps on working with old devices across distributions and updates.
Linux takes 6m-24m till vendor unsupported drivers stabilize - but at that point, it works way better than windows (and basically forever) in my experience.
I am sure they are, as was the i386. And yet, from experience of ~20 people, none had hardware obsoleted by Ubuntu, even very old hardware - though some had hardware obsoleted by win10 (which was in some cases the trigger to try Ubuntu)
Linux just assumes that all drivers must be perfect with no bugs, and must be open source and distributed with Linux itself. That's just not realistic.