Linux friction is “unpredictable” but windows friction isn’t, because you have a lot of windows experience and not much in Linux. I don’t think you’d feel the same after a few months of Linux.
This shit still happens today.
Twice in 1 year I've had my bootloader entry just disappear after a reboot. No idea what happened. Wasn't tied to any particular update either.
If I were non-technical, it would ruin my week.
But KDE at least recovered kicker (the panel) over after a message. Windows 11 shows up nothing.
IME Windows people actually do root cause analysis on the behavior of their systems somewhere between rarely and never. There's a high background level of mystery and superstition on Windows that even highly technical computing professionals on Windows are habituated to. In contrast, that's something that just a few years of daily Linux usage made not only unnecessary for me, but unacceptable to me.
Every time I return to Windows I'm a little bit optimistic... and then it becomes clear to me that I've forgotten how bad it can actually be.
I came through with Windows certs, but had always been a Linux guy, and now work entirely with Linux. Windows people don't actually solve problems, hence the joke about "Turn it off and on again", making it into mainstream.
You will very rarely see a Windows person open up a debugger, unless they're an actual developer. Meanwhile on Linux you can peek inside the process that's hanging and see what it's borked on.
Oh no, the NFS mount has dropped and the process is stuck trying to read it!
Oh no, reboot
There's a real cost/benefit question involved in root cause analysis, of course. But that childhood experience turned out to be representative of what I'd continue to witness in the rest of my professional life. When you always choose expedient ignorance, you end up living and working without ever having a clear idea of what your computer is doing, and each investigation feels like another Herculean task you're obliged to skip.
DISM largely does the same thing as reinstall without nuking all your files/settings assuming you can get it pointed at a valid source if winsxs doesn't have the thing it needs.
Windows has pretty robust tooling to do the same, even if no one uses it. Process Monitor (procmon) will trivially tell you the same on Windows. Arguably the GUI is easier to use than strace since you can both proactively and retroactively apply filters. Main issue is letting it run too long and eating up a bunch of RAM with the event buffer
MS's own documentation is incredibly lacking in actual resolution to problems, just always shifting or work arounds.