Yeah, this isn't Linux. Linux is better than this these days.
I've been on Linux some 28 years now, and it used to be like that¹. But today? I haven't had a kernel or graphics driver update failing on me for years. Maybe 10+ years? Granted, my Linux is the most boring, hardly-configged Unbuntu LTS. Boring hardware. Boring drivers. Everything optimized to "Just Work" - My machine pays my bills and if I'm down for a day because I fiddled around with some fancy custom trackpad module, or special Bluetooth whatevers, it's costing me actual money.
I'm certainly in my terminal 80% of the time (developing in nvim etc), so can't say much about how much it is needed by someone who doesn't know or use that terminal.
¹ My personal worst was at a conference doing a presentation for a 200+ audience having to recompile X, while entertaining the audience, because the beamer wasn't found and X crashed on it.
Edit: oh, and not to mention graphics (Nvidia), multiple monitors and HiDPI, especially with fractional scaling and different multiples per display. HiDPI on Linux doesn't work nearly as well as Windows and macOS.
On the AMD, I couldn't use the webcam for a good six months under Windows. It wouldn't detect some part of the USB tree.
On the Intel, for a good year, I couldn't get 4k@60Hz over DP via the HP dock. Then at some point, installing Intel drivers fixed the issue, but Windows would insist on "updating" to the older, borken version every so often. Now Windows also has the correct drivers. A different dock still doesn't work. Then there's the fact that the Windows installation (11 22h2) doesn't support the touchpad, nor the wifi card. Bonus points for the default install insisting on connecting to the internet for the online account thing.
Linux had 0 issues on both since the day I got them.
As for HiDPI, yeah, the Linux story, at least with X11, is non-existent if you want multiple HiDPI settings. But Windows is a crap shoot, too. It's easy to get a blurry mess: just connect and disconnect an external screen, and even the freaking windows 11 start menu is borked. It looks fine when you open it, but start typing something and enjoy the blurriness. Apps will be stuck with either enormous or tiny text. The context menus of the systray icons will appear all over the place.
Some apps manage to combine everything: tiny text, yet blurry, and displayed in the middle of the screen. To name and shame: Fortinet VPN client.
Intel for graphics and wifi is generally the safest choice. I pick laptops with those and have great success.
I'm not trying to argue that "Linux Just Works" or that "you won't run into hardware issues on Linux". I'm arguing that by choosing "boring" hardware, and "a boring LTS from a large distro" you won't.
I had a kernel update break a memory management API that JavaScript engines use about a year ago, and then before that my last kernel induced update breakage was in like 2012 with fglrx.
That broken kernel update also would not have made it into more conservative distros, as the change was rolled back 5 days later.
Meanwhile I have previously experienced the windows issue in this topic in like 2019. The windows 7 installer created even smaller reserved partitions than the windows 10 one (100 Vs 500 mb iirc), so users with systems upgraded from 7 to 10 would have seen this sooner.
And for completeness sake I've also experienced OS X fail at updating to High Sierra as that updater didn't like something about the way my employers provisioning software had set up the partition layout some years earlier.
I've administrated a fleet of ~100 Ubuntu devices that used nVidia for some AI stuff - unattended-upgrades disabled and all that - and yet graphics drivers broke in regular intervals, every couple of months. Apparently, nVidia drivers have some system in place that can update drivers on its own. The only solution was to uninstall all nVidia drivers, upgrade all packages, then re-install nVidia drivers.
But somehow Debian keeps uninstalling the display manager. One would think this is the easiest problem in the world to avoid, but they avoid every hard problem, and this one passes by.
I realise it doesn't help now, but in the future you may want to avoid hardware that's specifically hostile to Linux.
there's a reason I chose my latest laptop specifically because it was Ryzen.
I just meant it as a lighthearted joke.
Every time I've tried Linux, I've had to dive into the terminal and paste commands from the internet to get normal things to work.
I've no problem with more than that. I don't know what hardware you're using, but that's atypical.