My experience is just the opposite: Linux requires more up-front tinkering, but once you get it into a shape you want, it tends to stay that way and get out of your way. Windows, by contrast, requires much more ongoing active maintenance, and previous releases were prone to simply shitting the bed without explanation or recourse. MacOS is better about this than Windows, but not as good as Linux.
Now if you're talking Arch Linux... sure. The Arch devs love yanking the carpet out from under you and then telling you "you should have read that forum post from a week ago if you didn't want your system to break". But other distros, like Slackware, Debian, and Void, are quite stable across updates.
Has Arch gotten much worse recently or something? When I used it they were pretty good about posting “manual intervention required” when needed on the front page of their site.
It hasn’t. I can’t remember a “rug pull” in the last 10 years. People forget arch packages are pretty much as close to upstream as you can get, the arch packagers tend to do as little as possible.
I surely love answering *Why I don't want to backup my files and settings to OneDrive" every few months OR Removing things like Edge Game Assist etc from autostarting.
Now if you're talking Arch Linux... sure. The Arch devs love yanking the carpet out from under you and then telling you "you should have read that forum post from a week ago if you didn't want your system to break". But other distros, like Slackware, Debian, and Void, are quite stable across updates.