In JavaScript world that's really not that much. A project I've been working on has 120k+ files in node_modules, and `yarn install` creates the whole directory tree in a few seconds. It's not some obscure issue nobody ever runs into.
If that is the case, then your machine maker obviously does not support linux. So, it's no surprise that your machine had problems with linux.
If you buy a machine that supports linux, you would not see those problems. Nothing to do with linux, mostly to do with interaction of linux and your machine manufacturer.
On desktop, Fedora has been by far the most reliable. Ubuntu LTS, as far as I can tell from using it for work, just means that annoying bugs that have been fixed in the upstream never get backported.
Case in point: Bluetooth on Ubuntu LTS has always been much less reliable for me than on Fedora.
Disclaimer: This is only my anecdotal experience, use whatever works best for you.
> you can't get only the bug fixes without the new bugs
> if you know how experiment with getting a new kernel or video driver
I would agree with you if I was on my old machine with an nVidia graphics card which for what it is worth my new machine is a much better experience with AMD processor and integrated graphics but still how do you explain audio in failing to work as soon as I upgraded to Fedora 33 / kernel 5.8 and it (mostly) resolving itself when upgrading to 5.9 kernel? Is this a kernel bug or not? What caused it? What can we do to prevent it from happening in the future?
Then when I want to try the next LTS years later I install it on a different partition and check if it works or not for my use case.
For my work I use Intellij , when there is a big update I get the .tag.gz and try it. If something goes wrong I still have the working version and I can go back.
Updating to latest and greatest was fun when I had the time and when I knew how to format the disk using "fdisk" and it was pleasurable to read and tweak stuff, this days I don't care about shiny stuff and my work does not require latest libraries and I am not using any first gen of hardware.
So IMO if you want stability and no surprises and the ability to maybe upgrade the kernel and a driver Ubuntu is a good solution(not sure about Debian or SUSE) and also I don't have experience with Wayland so maybe that invalidates things and is impossible to get a stable working Wayland setup.
The linked post explains that there is a performance regression in a very rare and specific usecase: creating 100k files in a short span of time. And I'm not talking about unpacking boost, that's not enough files.
Additionally, it will be fixed before any distro packages it. (even Arch is still on 5.9.14.)
On the other hand btrfs got rather impressive speedups for fsync https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5....
Why are people making so much noise instead of just reporting the bug upstream when stuff goes wrong with btrfs, and why do we hear so little about the positive impact of new improvements. Almost like the people behave like customers of commercial operating systems. :-)