/troll
I can't say I've heard of that happening to people on Linux at all other than maybe early days of Xorg. Damage (reversible or otherwise) to hardware is extraordinarily rare on Linux, I can only think of it happening during the very early days of EFI and only under very specific conditions.
There was that LG CD-ROM drive which treated a CD-RW command (which it should ignore or reject since it's not a CD-RW drive) as a firmware upload command. When a newer Linux kernel started using that command, these drives got bricked (source: https://lwn.net/Articles/55537/ and https://web.archive.org/web/20041204072839/http://www.mandra...).
https://www.phoronix.com/news/UEFI-rm-root-directory
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/efivarfs....
Most users will just take their machine in to the Apple Store when this kind of thing happens, rather than try to fix it themselves.
This is similar to macOS, Windows, or even FreeBSD releases. I haven’t seen any Linux distribution that has such comprehensively coordinated releases. Between systemd and the Linux kernel, I’m not sure it would be possible.
Many distros have good documentation, but, in my experience, far too often the bulk of it is in out of date wikis or forums. Perhaps this is out of date thinking and I’ve missed the train in the past 10 years.
As a counterpoint, OpenWRT has been good, but their main “product”, imho, is LuCI. Lower level issues often require vendor specific forums.
If we want to compare apples to apples, then we compare:
Mac with macOS updates installed regularly, and only those provided by Apple. Non-Apple apps get dropped in /Applications like they should be. If there's an installer that asks for root access, you might get boned.
Linux preinstalled with OS updates installed regularly, and only those provided by the vendor. Apps that don't come with the OS's package manager should be installed somewhere under $HOME, and never installed systemwide as root.
Sure, if you have a Mac and disable SIP (or whatever it's called nowadays) and start mucking around with files in /System or whatever, because you want to install some mod that does something cool, you might have a bad time. Same as if you decide that screwing around in /lib on a Linux machine is a good idea.
But if we actually compare these two apples, I suspect the Linux one would have fewer problems.
Of course, whether that's valid is at minimum a question of actual frequency of problems and relative impact and effort to fix, but from a perspective of optics and emotions I understand the reaction.
For one example on top of my head, sometimes I can't adjust the brightness of the monitor in the Macbook using the Notification Center (it is grayed out), but if I open the "Settings -> Displays" I can do it. Never found a solution for it after searching for a while, so I just gave up.
Or the fact that I can't enable retina or font smoothing in my 1440p monitor, so the fonts looks ugly (I got used eventually, but they still looks worse than Windows or Linux in the same monitor). I used a workaround in the past using "Better Display" to create a 4k framebuffer that was downscaled to 1440p, but this was so slow and also prone of other issues so eventually I just got used to the ugly fonts.
Another one: I have a TouchBar Macbook (again, this is a work-issued laptop), but I just want it to work as a normal keyboard: show the Function keys, if I press Fn show the shortcuts. Yep, doesn't work: while you can do this, pressing Fn while pressing some of the shortcuts in the TouchBar doesn't work. This is especially infuriating because one of the shortcuts that doesn't work is the brightness one. Go back to the first issue and you can see why this drive me mad sometimes.
