I've had lots of Debian updates breaking my sound system. And twice when they pushed NetworkManager into the KDE dependencies, and when they pushed idmapd into NFSv4, it broke my network shares.

I can't remember anything else breaking on stable. It's been a much experience than updating Windows.

Sound has always been utterly fucked though. Well, more fucked than most shit. (I've actually had suprisingly good experiences with it, though my expectations are also scaled low.)

NetworkMangler joins a long list of other FooMangler tools which are best destroyed with extreme prejudice. I manage WiFi with an /etc/network/interfaces stanza, and it mostly works. Static wired interfaces are, of course, vastly simpler.

I agree that the Linux experience is hugely better than Windows, and the Debian experience hugely better than RPM-based distros. This is why having the mouse, THE FUCKING MOUSE!!!!!! fail is .... I'm beyond words.

That it's been months is the other problem.

But libinput is a vital part of the new, improved Wayland future, so obviously it must be better. Because of this development of the existing touchpad driver has even been dropped in favour of it.

You'll be receiving the invoice for my next refill of blood-pressure medication.

I swear to fucking god Linux has lost the beat.

It never found the beat for the needs of John Q. End-User

No doubt that it never penetrated the desktop market as many of us had hoped it might.

It did, however, serve the needs and wants of those of us who'd experienced Unix and wanted that for ourselves. Doing a vastly superior job than the Unixes that started us off in the first place. Speaking for myself, 3.4BSD, Ultrix, SunOS, Solaris, HPUX, DGUX, Irix, AIX, and probably a few others. Plus some other platforms.

The rot started to show with the GNOME Project and PulseAudio. Both introduced a tremendous amount of complexity and gratuitous change with little benefit by way of utility or ease-of-management. Systemd has largely sealed the deal.

The lack of setting on a standard desktop offering has also hurt, and for fairly complex reasons. Red Hat is a commercial success (like Microsoft before it) because of its technical shortcomings, not in spite of them -- they directly feed its revenue model. This is quite unfortunate.

I think Ubutnu made missteps, but was (and may yet be) a superior option.

OTOH, building tools for the billions is hard. I'm willing to admit that. Microsoft only barely manages, as does Apple, and both have had quite notable failures.

It seems you're suffering symptoms of Poettering Syndrome.

The key is to remove all applications he has touched (logind/systemd/NetworkManager/PulseAudio/Avahi), and you'll find yourself with a stable system.

Good distros, such as Calculate Linux or Gentoo, help a lot with this.

However, should you continue to use Red Hat-based distributions (of which Debian, Arch, and Ubuntu should be considered, post-systemd; package managers notwithstanding), you will constantly experience these pain points.

It's funny that even Poettering-enabled version of Gentoo has way less problems than either Ubuntu or Fedora...