it's a pithy slogan and yeah the community vibes are rancid (on windows you have gamers writing most of the blogs though). It scares a lot of people who could use it to help them. it probably made me take way longer to get back to it because for about a decade I thought I'd need to memorize more, because my experiences were pre-online resources really existing.
but.
you have more problems on Linux, sure, but they're smaller. You can resolve most of them in an hour or two as long as you have Internet, but on Windows good luck finding it or having it be an easy fix.
you need to know more at first, a lot more if you aren't familiar with command line interfaces. In exchange for far less intractable problems over the life of the machine.
And for the things that fail, you need to know less overall because they're all made of the same parts. Your skills fixing one thing means you're faster when others come up. sure, packaging is a mess often and setting up stuff outside of package managers takes more work, but mostly because you're choosing where it dumps it's files.
config flags for your apps suck, but you'd be doing similar in windows -- the reason you need to use them in the first place is windows doesn't support it in the first place, so you wouldn't have the problem there, but you also wouldn't have the software. such is the cost of absolute power.
When windows fails, parts of your system gradually just stop working until you can dedicate a weekend to learning how to fix that very specific problem.
skills that only matter for that one aspect, and don't really help next time. I once lived with a machine that had a 50% hit to performance and to this day I don't know what was wrong with it after 200+ hours looking across 4 years. it survived 4 hardware swaps and 2 Windows versions. I installed Linux on it instead of wasting another 200. game support is ok if it runs on steam, otherwise you may be in proton config hell.
and you'll never be forced to reboot at a time you don't want to, just delay your update a few weeks outside of critical security ones.
thankfully windows gave you WSL, Windows Subsystem for Linux, where you can learn cli Linux from the comfort of the Windows terminal, and just reinstall it over itself if you wreck something.
