Agreed, you get to pick between a system that empowers you to do whatever you like, or an unborkable system. If you need something that won’t let you shoot yourself in the foot, you ought to be using an immutable distro.

For ages I blamed GNU/Linux for breaking when I was unknowingly causing issues. These days, I don’t fix what isn’t broken, and if I can’t help myself, I make sure I understand what I’m doing, write down any changes I make, and ensure I have a snapshot ready in case things don’t work out.

GNU/Linux may not exclusively be for advanced users anymore, but system customization still is.

Initial setup can be hard, and then, because GNU/Linux lets you do whatever you want, It’s not hard to bork the system if you’re using commands you don’t understand. The biggest realization for me was that if I want a stable system, I can’t expect to experiment with it / customize it to the nth degree unless I have a robust rollback / recovery solution like timeshift in place. Feeling very empowered after leaving windows, I have destroyed many systems, but truly, if you set up your system and then leave it alone, these days it’s not difficult to have a good experience.

But yea, you’re totally right: the userbase can be toxic AF, and there’s no one place you can go to learn the basics you really ought to know.