That isn't a just Linux thing. You can easily fork-bomb (or equivalent) Windows/iOS/other and so forth, especially (though not only) if running as a privileged user.
> And then non-obvious issues that just "appear" out of nowhere
That is definitely not something that I've never seen when using Windows! Where it has happened to me under Linux it has been eventually traced to a hardware issue or a bad update (the latter I've experienced on both those OSs over the years and the former will affect everything).
>That is definitely not something that I've never seen when using Windows!
Case in point: my laptop (running the Windows 10 it came with) recently stopped hibernating properly, well it hibernates OK but half the time when it wakes up the screen does not turn on, and this evening it has decided that it doesn't want to be asleep while plugged in. If I tell it to sleep (through power key or start menu) while plugged in it does very temporarily and then returns to the login screen. If I tell it to sleep when running on battery it does but immediately wakes up once power is connected.
While Linux distros are far from free from random problems at times, in my experience Windows exhibits them more and tends to be harder to diagnose because more is hidden.
I've crashed DWM with WSL before, by doing something completely unrelated to Windows.
What happens is you start getting the solitaire effect because suddenly no windows have graphics buffers anymore
The solution is running a userspace out-of-memory killer, e.g. earlyoom.
My story, I bought a new widget, a gaming wheel a few years back, and it did not work on my Windows machine, I even reinstalled Windows, installed the drivers from disk it did not work. I send the thing back and report it broken and the guys call me to report that works perfectly. In the end I bought a different model that worked both on Windows and Linux.
So a gadget with official Windows support did not work on my machine, even after I wasted my time reinstalling Windows just in case but worked fine for some support people.
I had a diffrent experience with a USB WifFi antenna , it come with a mini CD with drivers but my PC had no CD Drive, there was no online source for that no name brnd.
I plugged it on a Linux machine and it worked, then I done a lsusb and found the real chip powering the device, then Googled for that I found a compatible Windows driver on a drivers website and I fixed it for Windows machine.
Linux has problems, but install a LTS distro on compatible hardware and you should not have issues for a few years.
To balance things, my latest bad experience in KDE was when Kwin crashed and refused to enable compositing again printing a vague reason in the logs, I found using Google that KWin put an isOPenGLSafe=false in soem log file and refused to start compositing but for some reason (maybe is a valid one) was incapable to print also that "I refuse to start compositing because of this setting - lesson for us devs, when we put stuff in log messages, put as much info as possible
And following up by silently escalating recently-solved problems beyond the reach of posted workarounds.
Just in case the doubling down does not proceed as expected.
I've supported both professionally, and no, you don't. I blame the claim on a lot of people using commercial operating systems feeling a bit guilty, like they're supposed to be on Linux to be a real developer. They respond by criticizing an OS that they don't really use for the problems that they imagine happen all the time. Instead, what's happening is that they, personally, always run into problems trying to figure out why something won't work in prod, or trying to get their VMs to work like the tutorial, and they assume that people who use Linux as a daily driver run into problems at that rate. They never pay attention to Linux unless something critical has already broken.
Also, whenever they decide that they're going to try Linux again to see if it's ready for them yet, they always choose Arch (it used to be Gentoo) or the latest trendy distro that has a MacOS aping desktop. Just install Debian, it's easy.
Contribution does not necessarily mean code. It can be documentation, design, UX, sharing information, or just working getting people familiar with Linux.