Linux is extremely stable. There are some exploits for it, but generally you are very unlikely to accidentally get a virus on it. If you don't update your software, it could potentially run for YEARS without a reboot on Linux. Maybe that is possible on Windows but I have yet to see it really.

If you mean API/ABI stability, the question is far more nuanced. I think most Linux software you are likely to use will run on any Linux distro equally well, although you may require it to be rebuilt for your particular distro. In the worst case there is always Docker. Statically linked programs can work for a VERY long time across distros. Microsoft probably has a bigger commitment to backward compatibility right now, but Linux binary software can be carried forward for many years as well with few/no changes. The Wayland thing is going to upset this stability, but in theory XWayland should make the old stuff keep working.

Most popular distros on common hardware "just work" these days and can be used easily by normal people. You might be confused if you tried to migrate a binary executable forward or between distros and it didn't work, but it is mostly developers and admins who think about such things.

what's the drive to use a nix but 'actively dont want to know' about things?

just need to fulfill some software necessity?

The two most major OSs out there specialize in catering to users that don't want to know how the thing works -- it seems like you're swimming against the current a little bit, no?

also I don't think that anyone has ever called any nix stable and had software politics and human-stuff in mind ; what's meant is that it doesn't crash and burn when you're trying to use it.

Modern unix gives me the choice to know a lot about some parts and stay ignorant about others. I don't think there's anything wrong with being real into, say, the network stack and wanting other nerds to handle the GUI for you.

Everyone deserves freedom. Tinkerers and regular users, software engineers and grandmas, artists and Paint users.

Linux obviously has this nerdy root culture because it hardly cannot. But the freedom it brings is for everyone.

This is especially important in a time where MS has clearly stopped caring about Windows in the way they did in the 90s and 2000s, they largely don't care about consumer windows anymore, as long as Excel and all the enterprise shit stays locked in. So there's nothing stopping them from shoving ads and spyware (windows account) into every inch of the OS because they hope most users won't do anything, and if some small % switch to something else, oh well.

And macOS has clearly also stopped being cared for - most of apples revenue is iPhones and services. They mostly just want to sell overpriced hardware to corpos who need Xcode and to users who are in their walled garden.

We need to respect these users and bring the freedom to them that we all deserve.

Also - I'm a software engineer myself, and if I may be so bold, I like to think im a pretty good one. Certainly well positioned to understand how Linux works. And indeed I have spent enough time debugging weird shit that I suspect I know more than the average Linux bear.

And I STILL have no patience for X vs wayland bullshit. Draw the pixels or get the fuck out of my face. I literally don't care except which one lets me use 2 hiDPI monitors + the laptop display with fractional scaling and closing and reopening the laptop lid isn't some kind of bizarre edge case event. Wayland managed to get that right on Gnome for me as of late. I have a vague understanding of why, but largely just want Gnome to figure this crap out for me so I can run IntelliJ, PyCharm and vscode at the same time without weird artifacting.

This stuff just kinda works on Linux too. This discussion is for distro maintainers (think of them like OS packagers) and power users. If you just install Ubuntu or Bazzite or whatever, it should just work

I mean if you are a normal user and most people are, you absolutely do not need to care about both Wayland and X11. Distributions ship with working configurations. It just works.

Most of the people complaining about the transition just like to nitpick about low level pieces of technology which don’t actually impact their usage at all. It was the same with systemd for at least a decade.