In my experience the kernel and drivers are better than ever, but the desktops are awful and have grown worse. When KDE 4 came out I went to simple window managers like i3 and fvwm. These are extremely stable but things as simple as looking at photos in file manager are painful, and forgetting how to change the clock when I fly to a new timezone is frustrating.

This is surprising to me. I do most of my web development on Linux Mint and crashes are rare - like Sasquatch rare.

I've also used:

Mandriva Unbuntu 14 Slackware

And had the same near-perfect performance with those distros as well. I was always told one of the great advantages with Linux is how stable it is and for the last decade or so, I've found that to be true.

Now I'm curious to know what you're doing to make your OS crash so much.

I have run Ubuntu and RedHat on multiple hardware, Desktop, not just server, dozens of machines the past 10 years. Freezing on all those hardware combinations was never a problem. Crashing was absolutely never a problem.