It's good until you boot your system and end up with an unrecoverable black screen that meeses your day of work for no good reason. Linux is free if you don't value your time.

You can't really make blanket statements like this about "Linux" in general because it depends on what distro you use. For example, in NixOS to fix this type of problem all you have to do is rollback to a previous configuration that is known to work. I've not used it, but I believe Arch has something similar.

Even with imperatively configured distros like Ubuntu, it's generally much easier to recover from a "screen of death" than in Windows because the former is less of a black box than the latter. This means its easier to work out what the problem is and find a fix for it. With LLMs that's now easier than ever.

And, in the worst case that you have to resort to reinstalling your system, it's far less unpleasant to do that in a Linux distro than in Windows. The modern Windows installer is painful to get through, and then you face hours or days of manually reinstalling and reconfiguring software which you can do with a small handful of commands in Linux to get back to a state that is reasonably similar to what you had before.

I dunno, I spend less time fighting with any of my several linux systems than the macbook I'm required to use for work, even without trying to do anything new with it. I choose to view this charitably and assume most of the time investment people perceive when switching operating systems is familiarity penalties, essentially a switching cost. The longer this remains the case, the less charitably I'm willing to view this.

Not in my experience. I've run both Windows and Linux for the last decade and Windows is the only OS that I ever have problems with updates wasting my time and breaking things. I've been running image-based Linux for the last two years and the worst case is rebooting to rollback to the last deployment. Before that it was booting a different btrfs snapshot.

Fun aside: I had a hardware failure a few years ago on my old workstation where the first few sectors of every disk got erased. I had Linux up and running in 10 minutes. I just had to recreate the efi partition and regenerate a UKI after mounting my OS from a live USB. Didn't even miss a meeting I had 15 minutes later. I spent hours trying to recover my Windows install. I'm rather familiar with the (largely undocumented) Windows boot process but I just couldn't get it to boot after hours of work. I just gave up and reinstalled windows from scratch and recovered from a restic backup.

You aren't comparing Linux to anything here.

Windows has recently been a complete shitshow - so even if Linux hasn't gotten any better (it has) it is now likely better than fiddling around with unfucking Windows, and Windows doing things like deleting all your files.