*However* Apple specifically only targets a very small subset of devices. The amount of obvious bugs that slip through in every release upgrade against such a small handful of devices from a company as big as Apple is pretty disappointing
Windows has to run on the overwhelming majority of "weird" x86 devices on the planet. The amount of work they have to put in with their hardware partners is comparatively staggering
My question is still legit: is there an (relatively) unbiased third-party that tracks bugs across major OS releases? Is that a bad question to ask?
It seems weird that these companies which presumably employ some programmers have this convention of bundling up all the bugs together for some nice combinatorial confusion. Everybody knows you keep your code in a working state from commit to commit, so you only have to handle one bug at a time, right?
EVERY OS release will have some issues, and the people who are most impacted are the ones who chime in. If it "just works" for someone, they aren't going to chime in.
This is true of Mac, Windows, Linux, etc. I'd be curious to see a quantitative pre-release breakdown by OS and version. That might be more useful than individual anecdotes, as interesting as those are.