Yeah. Anecdotally I once spent a "Windows Evening" trying to figure out why a game would freeze at the controls remapping menu. Found out that Windows' own game controllers menu was experiencing the same freeze. I went so far as to reinstall Windows entirely, only to find that the issue wasn't resolved. Started disconnecting devices out of desperation, only to find out that the issue was caused by the driver of a USB DAC I had connected...

Computers suck, in general. I have a hard time seeing an attempt to leverage blame on Windows or Linux as anything but an excuse to start a flame war.

They really are a mess, if you dig a bit deeper. Many of the OS issues are actually even bigger hardware issues, which the OS failed to amend.

My gripe with Windows is usually not related to the operating system itself, but rather the direction it's headed as a product. And I also don't like that when people say that Linux is so tinker-y, compared to Windows, which "just works". A system that "just works", in my experience, is a system that the user is used to. Familiarity makes the issues seem trivial, and the unfamiliar issues seem insurmountable, which hardly results in a fair comparison.

Windows just works without a hassle far more often than any linux distro I've installed.

My experience is different, my systems usually work, but there have been quite a few head-scratchers with both Linux and Windows.

My experience is precisely the opposite.

This reasoning implies that every OS is equally buggy in ways that impact usability. I think this is likely untrue.

I don’t think it really matters if windows bugs exist, but how often they occur and impact use of the tool.

That implication would be a bad one, but in the specific case of a bland Linux distro (let's say Debian) vs. Windows I haven't ever seen much difference between the number of problems you run into.

The major difference for me is that Linux problems are always theoretically operator-fixable i.e. the information needed to fix your problem is available to you, even if you're not technical enough to understand it. The means to fix Windows problems are frequently not accessible at all, anywhere.

While I've had plenty of Linux evenings, I've had stuff broken on Windows that stretched into weeks until I finally gave up and reinstalled.

I agree. I don't know if it's down to luck, but I have a very positive experience with Linux, even on random notebooks, and I also really tried a good amount of distros too. I also have an extensive user experience with Windows. Currently, in my head, they are on par. There's stupid shit in both.