But then, I hear Linux people talk about systemd making their system unusable, and having to recompile the kernel to make network cards work, and laptops never waking up from sleep, and reading the arch wiki to find which bizarre kernel options to pass to make CPU low power modes work, and (yesterday) having to update the kernel to make chrome work.
I'm not saying these are all real problems, just that if you only hear the bad, it sounds terrible!
Outside of systemd, that is hardware related. And hardware is a pain because most of it is made with barely any testing towards Windows. And Microsoft and standards are on a "best effort" basis.
Thus you get odd behavior in hardware trying to match "extended" behavior in Windows, that is then papered over by the binary only driver shipped with the product initially. None of that being available to the Linux devs trying to get things to behave sanely.
The systemd issue is quite different, as for many it seems to be making Linux more Windows like. And they specifically turned to Linux in the first place because they could no longer stand the cryptic errors and "heisen-bugs" that was daily life while using Windows.
Linux before systemd was to them a land of predictable computing. If something broke the error would point you in the right direction for a fix. And once it was fixed it stayed fixed.
I'm not saying these are all real problems, just that if you only hear the bad, it sounds terrible!