Linux

I've never, in multiple decades of using Windows, and thousands of updates, ever had an update installed and not had my computer work again. I suspect this is most people's experience, or they wouldn't use it.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you aren't trolling and instead congratulate you on being a lucky Windows user. That's unicorn-level awesome to me. As a former tech for public universities for 14 years, I can attest to the validity of OP's description.

Faculty and staff begged for methods to postpone updates that randomly introduced breaking changes, and its easy to recall the many times I was in a lecture hall rolling back audio drivers that broke the A/V setup after updates. Professors would be mid-lecture or mid-exam and have a video card driver update without warning and set their screen to mirror instead of extend, putting their notes or answer key up for the class to see and breaking their lesson plan. Disabled hardware would be updated and reenabled, breaking input or output devices.

I've certainly had updates (especially when they began including BIOS updates without asking) break system function irreversibly as well, like when whole campuses had a new TPM version (1.x > 2.x) pushed without warning, which caused them to fail to boot with the static image they were running. The state was slow to fully-implement WSUS, but got on the ball by 2018. That changed everything.

Suffice to say that while you my have gotten lucky and never experienced any downtime resulting from an unscheduled Windows update, others definitely have.

We have found the one Windows fan on Lemmy!

I still use windows almost entirely because of certain software I need for work. But if not for that I'd switch in a heartbeat, I'm not the most tech savvy person but in my experience Linux is much nicer and easier to use and if you need to debug it every 5 minutes you're doing something very wrong. The only downside is software support which I'd argue isn't the fault of Linux.

Windows is, by a landslide, the easier system to use, regardless of what the reasons are.

Sometimes people find a thing easier to use, but then it turns out they only believe that because they have a lot more (or more recent) experience with it than the alternative.

I have used both Windows and Linux extensively. The easier system to use is always the one I'm more familiar with. (This became obvious when I tried using Windows again after being away from it for a decade or two.)

I have seen storage corruption on a Windows 10 computer cause a boot loop where it constantly tries to verify the integrity of the filesystem or something like that. I forget what happened to that computer though. I think it was just replaced.

Also, niche types of computers like tiny laptops tend to get blue screens a lot more than more common computers because there's probably some faulty driver, but you can say that's not really gonna be Microsoft's fault.

All computers can crash if you encounter rare or weird bugs and hardware failures. How often it happens is a statistical question that might be hard to answer when there's so much going on and opinions about what could be happening.

I would think generally that relatively new computers running Windows, especially gaming PCs, tend to very rarely encounter significant issues (outside of actual manufacturing faults). They have well supported hardware and that hardware runs fast.

Slowdowns and weird behaviour are another category too. You could have a super fast computer that's always crashing, or a slow old computer you've never ever seen crash (a lot of servers are kind of like that). I had an old computer running Windows 10 (someone gave me it when it was being got rid of for an upgrade), and it was horrible because everything in the interface would take actual seconds to load, even though this computer could run fairly recent games fine around 5 years ago. I installed Linux on that instead and everything was silky smooth, smoother than it ever felt to use that computer before.

Linux often works a lot better when it comes to old computers. The drivers can even in some cases be supported and updated long after it stopped being a new computer, by both a handful of enthusiasts and by big companies that hire people to prevent servers crashing. Thinkpads can be like this, so if you ever wanted to get a computer specifically for Linux, it would be best to get one a few years old that's popular in tech company offices.

How well you can use an interface is a bit of a skill issue, or rather an experience issue. It's a bit like the stereotype of a possibly senile old person who can't use the menus on their TV because it's too complicated. If you're used to a certain interface, it shouldn't take any thought at all to do the things you usually do on a computer.

Interfaces are also a matter of preference, and Linux has lots of different interfaces you can use. If you tried them all you'd probably find that one was your favourite for a few different reasons, but most reasonable people don't have time for that so they'll stick with whatever they can work out how to use and find alright.

It doesn't seem like you're gonna be using Linux much (at least not by choice) any time soon, and you might even have had some bad experiences with it before. That's fair; I'm not trying to convince you that you need to use Linux and it sounds like Windows works very well for you.

You do seem to have the impression though that all Linux computers are constantly crashing and glitching out in weird ways, which is simply not true. Most servers around the world that build up the internet use Linux, and most of the popular ones rarely ever go down. That means these computers are constantly running, humming away with their bits in a big room somewhere, and Linux almost never has any issues that stop them, especially full system crashes. Power outages are a more common reason for servers to be down, and you don't need to be a sysadmin constantly making intricate bugfixes to keep a Linux PC running while you play games.

TL;DR: All computers can have bugs or crash and Linux isn't constantly crashing. That's probably why everyone seems like they're seething at what you said. Lol