For what its worth I think Linux can work great, and obviously you definitely do not need to switch to Wayland. However, what I really mean to say is, it's in a rough position for anyone looking to switch. While you may say "ah, just use X11" and I'd even totally agree, the problem is that many users genuinely need things that only Wayland does well, like again, for laptops mixed DPI is a damn-near must-have and it just isn't a very good experience on X no matter what you do.

Also, what distro to recommend? Honestly, I find Arch to be one of the best mixes of stable and reliable, which is odd. Somehow I find Pop!_OS and Ubuntu installs with fucked up dpkg issues that I can't even figure out, and sometimes I wind up just manually grabbing packages with apt download and forcing things into a correct state. I'd expect Arch with an inexperienced user to be worse, but multiple datapoints strongly disagree so far; the biggest issue with Arch has just been installs. If Arch were friendlier to install and had smoother updates, it would be hands-down the way to go for noobs. Archinstall is certainly a step forward from browsing the wiki on lynx, so there is that.

Feels, though, like there should be some immutable "just works" distro, that gives users a good mix of things. Like... give users an immutable base with image based deployment. Flatpak apps. Maybe ChromeOS crostini-style chroots to use a "traditional" distro? SteamOS is somewhere close here.

I like Linux, and I use only Linux on my own hardware aside from VMs (and practically only NixOS at that) but is it in a position to seriously eat at Windows? I think not in the desktop and laptop market. Hopefully some day, though.

Absolutely agree with you on all points, and I think Arch is often falsely thought of as unstable. Its rolling, but of course the software is vetted and stable.

I have had other distros break in more ways and more destructively than arch, for sure

> every few months, an update bricks my install

I'm really curious about why this is. I have a desktop I update daily, a laptop I update very irregularly (once even went without an update for over a year), and a toy server that I update once a year or so (I know, terrible security practice). All running arch. And I think I've had two situations where something broke significantly after an update, and even those didn't require a live boot USB.

What desktop environment/window manager/compositor do you use? I'd guess one of those is the culprit if anything

I'm on nvidia, x11, kde plasma, ... its probably some firmware package for something instead.

I also have the arch live USB for the same reason. For me the issue was that /tmp was full and after and update that included the kernel I didn't read the logs of mkinitcpio that told me of the failure of the rebuild.