My experience too: "Linux friction is unpredictable. The update tool freezing for no reason. System-wide slowdown I can't diagnose. Notifications telling me too many programs are listening for file changes and asking me to decide whether to increase the limit (a decision I don't understand why I'm being asked to make)."

I'm not a windows user anymore, haven't been for a decade or so, but it wasn't until a couple months that I finished the switch when I moved from windows to bazzite in my gaming rig.

Which is why this statement is surprising. Not because I disagree with it, Linux friction is indeed unpredictable even for those of us that customized our own installation ad infinitum and know intimately the architecture of the system.

It's because friction in windows is even more unpredictable, at least with the limited interaction I had with it recently. Peripherals will disconnect randomly and removing them in order to reconnect fails. You still have to use decades old interface like regedit end device manager often to fix those issues. Random update reboots, updates that fail without useful logs, only generic error codes. And the whole culture of downloading and installing execs is the worst if all. There is the windows store, which is terrible, and chocolatey which is nice, and they aren't a full replacement for going online and downloading random binary blobs, which is a huge source of unpredictability, because suddenly every software needs to implement their own private supply chain to deliver their updates.

So all in all Linux has less friction than windows. It breaks down with updates, you go online and can usually find resources to help you fix it. Windows breaks down and it usually takes someone inside to acknowledge the problem, fix it and release in the next update, because there are some classes of problems that just aren't fixable in windows, and those that are will usually take you through a journey into the system registry that, if you asked me, didn't age too nicely.

It is largely what one is used to but for me windows was always this unknowable black box, sure, you could get good at it but there was always so much, no source, many interlinked subsystems. when things work it is not so bad. when they don't... Linux was a lot better, especially if you use a more minimal distro, But even it is this huge confusing mess. What really clicked for me was when I tried openbsd, it was the first time I felt like I had a system I really understood. I started with a router, now I am one of those wierdos who use it on the desktop. I would not actually recommend it to anyone, like I said it is largely what you are used to. but for me linux always felt more knowable than windows.

>asking me to decide whether to increase the limit

I think once every 2-5 years I get a new Linux computer, hit the inotify.max_user_watches thing, do a search, run a command once, and then never think about that particular problem on that machine again.