Unfortunately, there is no guarantee. If the maintainer for a driver stops maintaining it and no one else steps in to pick up the work then eventually it'll get removed if it isn't widely used.
The source will always be available, though, so a motivated person could bring it back to life. Not so in the Windows world. Or the Mac[1] world either, to be fair.
Installing old versions of Windows doesn't mean you can still access the drivers that were available when the OS was still supported.
If you still have the drivers handy - sure. I personally would trust older versions of Linux more than older versions of Windows though. And I say that as someone that is also typing this comment from a Windows desktop.
Newer old versions rely on Microsoft to activate them. Given the trajectory the indistry is moving toward, I don't have a lot of confidence that will last indefinitely.
More and more features these days are getting inextricably tied to the cloud, and it's becoming trickier to create offline installation media even for the ones that aren't.
>so a motivated person could bring it back to life.
The word "could" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. If my 20+ year old HW doesn't work on my latest Ubuntu, then the word "could" offers me no comfort.
>Not so in the Windows world.
I can install 20+ year old drivers on Windows 11 no problem without the original author needing to change anything or any motivated individual picking up the slack.
Not if they were only distributed through Windows update, or if it was that and the vendors long-gone website with custom flash for downloading the drivers, which archive.org didn't understand at the time...
