- 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 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).