That's quite strange. What distro? For a while I was managing several hundred Linux devices remotely, so I've done thousands of updates with no issues. Linux has been my daily driver for 15 years, and never had an update issue there (that I didn't create myself). Specifically the thing I've NEVER had an issue with was a standard system update. Apt upgrade, pacman or yay -SYU, things of that nature. Had plenty of problems when trying to do weird shit, but I've also learned how to solve those problems. I've never borked an important system so bad it became unrecoverable. Some distros are prone to update failure because they always give you bleeding edge releases. I'd suggest running Debian, a ridiculously stable "fire and forget" system. Many rolling distros, like Arch, I'd say to update every couple of days to avoid dependency chain problems. But again, none of this is difficult beyond having to read some documentation, and none of this should even be able to cause system loss. Did you do something else weird that you forgot to mention?