> Listen, if you're using Linux and you've never spent hours trying to find out how to install something or fix a problem deep in some obscure configuration file somewhere, are you even on Linux?

This is different from parent's statement that "things stop working".

I definitely spent countless hours with tweaks and fixes (although the pattern is radically different between desktop and laptop systems), but I've essentially never experienced that any component "stopped working".

There is only a single exception - an ethernet card that required a 3rd party package, and an update was buggy (later, the driver got upstreamed).

Based on my old desktop experience with Windows, it was actually inherently more unstable than Linux, as installers could do whatever they wanted - in Linux, package managers track the changes in the file system instead (to a large extent but not fully, although in worst case, excluding packaging bugs, the leftovers are just data).

I have used GNU/Linux as my personal desktop and laptop OS exclusively since 2012 (though I have used Windows 10 and MacOS Yosemite on work computers), and I have had a few issues:

- Going from Ubuntu 12.04 to 12.10 broke Xorg (maybe a problem with the AMD drivers, I lacked knowledge at that time to look into fixing it).

- I have occasionally gotten kernel panics under OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, I seem to recall a time when watching videos on YouTube via Firefox would reliably cause it to happen, I don't remember at all how I fixed it at the time; maybe an update or running from a snapshot... or was it under Arch and I installed the LTS kernel?

- And a problem of my own making: around the time when the KDE project started transitioning to Plasma 5 I was going back and forth between Arch and OpenSUSE TW and wound up trying Plasma 5 before it was really ready for use and I had a difficult time for a week or two.

I also wound up wrecking an Intel NUC the day I got it by putting it to sleep when it had an issue that suspending to RAM would wreck the thing, but that's more of an Intel failure than a GNU/Linux failure.

Anyway, I used Windows from version 3.1.1 until I wrecked my 7 install in 2012 so I've seen plenty of blue screens in my life, and I remember the iMac I used Yosemite on hard rebooting every time I started a Xubuntu VM in VirtualBox, so I have no issue just using GNU/Linux even if I do encounter some warts every now and again.

This sounds superficially convincing, until you consider how many hours I've spent trying to figure out stuff that goes wrong in Windows or MacOS. It's a coinflip between whether the conclusion of those efforts resolve in a solution, or instead ends with finding out there not a solution, or even that the lack of a solution is intentional, and every OS update comes with code designed to detect those solutions and silently remove them.

I've used Ubuntu since 2016 and the only issue I had (which I couldn't solve at the end and had to give up) was to install a driver for an old laser printer. Apart from that, I've had absolutely no issue for installing something and I am not a geek by any means.

For me those issues are either self-inflicted or Nvidia related. It's hard to blame Ubuntu when I'm trying to change the WM for some obscure thingy. I don't tend to do distro upgrades though but install fresh.