I've been on Mint for nearly 4 years now,. migrating from Windows.

The only hiccup I had was botched updates once, and the OS would error during boot.

The fix was easy, boot to terminal, fiddle with timeshift to restore to the point prior to update, then apply de updates carefully with a few reboots in between.

Now, was that easy? For someone well versed in the technicalities, yes. For a layman, probably not.

Now, that said, it was the only problem I had in 4 years. It has been very smooth sailing besides that.

My experience with Windows prior to that was always horrible. Yearly clean installs because after a while the computer felt extremely sluggish. Random blue screens for god knows what reason.

For a layman, that's a catastrophic entire OS-loss right? Especially if your issue is somewhat novel or stack specific. *Most people* (not us) just lost their only desktop computer and are now trying to debug by googling random OS words and browsing reddit and forums on their mobile to try and find out what went wrong with a seemingly benign update.

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Now, AI makes this *WAY* easier since you have a practically omniscient distro debugger with infinity patience and you don't have to wait on their responses. So this is probably coming down as a barrier soon, but I want to stress that "the only problem I had in 4 years" is loosely the same as "I bought a new car and the only problem I had was a catastrophic transmission failure. I just had to rebuild the transmission from scratch using specialized tools and knowledge and it was okay.