Comment by bitwize
My experience is just the opposite: Linux requires more up-front tinkering, but once you get it into a shape you want, it tends to stay that way and get out of your way. Windows, by contrast, requires much more ongoing active maintenance, and previous releases were prone to simply shitting the bed without explanation or recourse. MacOS is better about this than Windows, but not as good as Linux.
Now if you're talking Arch Linux... sure. The Arch devs love yanking the carpet out from under you and then telling you "you should have read that forum post from a week ago if you didn't want your system to break". But other distros, like Slackware, Debian, and Void, are quite stable across updates.
Public service announcement: those "forum posts" are mailing list announcements. You can subscribe to that mailing list (arch-announce): https://lists.archlinux.org/mailman3/lists/arch-announce.lis...
And it's almost always something you need to do at system upgrade time. It's not like your system doesn't boot all of a sudden.