Come on. Linux is stable enough for anyone. So many people have done exactly what you said can't be done, and then never again had to play tech support for their relatives. I can get a flash disk with Linux and it will work for the proverbial mom for years without touching it.

What I found happens often is pure confirmation bias. People already hate Linux and love Windows/OSX, then find reasons to confirm that. I'm sure I have some of that too, but I try to see all sides.

The amount of blue screens and shitty issues my wife puts up with on Windows is astonishing. Disconnecting/reconnecting dongles so they work again. Manually searching for drivers. She re-installs Windows every few months and normalizes it.

Same goes for OSX. Apple fanboys at work having random segfaults on services, OS upgrades that sometimes takes them down a full day. A coworker of mine still runs a years old OSX version because last time he updated he had to pay hundreds of dollars for Apple care to get his MacBook working again. I still remember when I had to use OSX, wasting days searching for solutions after every OS upgrade.

My point is: there are issues with all OSes and this generalization that "Linux is the bad one" is a plain lie. Especially for basic usage, which is what normal people usually stick to.

Yes, if you pick a bad distro and sometimes gets hardware from manufacturers that intentionally fuck Linux over, you're gonna have a hard time.

But on the other side, you have a choice. You can choose a more stable distro, you can tweak it as you like. Something other OSes can't offer.

Everyone is free to choose, but this meme against Linux is plain tiring.