Yeah maybe like in 1995... If you're having this kind of issue in the present day, you'd have to be shooting yourself in the foot very very intentionally. (An example is a broken custom Arch or Gentoo setup, which you shouldn't be using anyway unless you know exactly what you're doing.)
I've been regularly trying whatever Linux distro is supposed to be good on and off every other year, and there was always something that made me go 'that should be working right out the box' and then spend too much time fixing it.
If you're not able to connect to a NAS for some reason, that's almost definitely on you or your friend in this case. But even that aside, expecting a one to one transition has always felt odd to me... You don't switch from an Android device to an iOS device or vice versa with the expectation of everything working one to one. You usually understand that there's a lot of differences involved.
There's ofc things like VR that I will admit Linux is quite far behind in, but for general use, Linux is problem-free for the most part these days. And you definitely don't end up having an unbootable system pretty much ever unless you intentionally fuck it up. Like yeah, Linux lets me uninstall the kernel or bootloader if i choose to do that (it will try to warn me ofc) and that would render the system unbootable. But that would be me being irredeemably stupid, not the operating system's fault. Hell, some distros like Tumbleweed even come with a better snapshotting setup than both Windows and macOS, making it pretty much impossible to fuck it up that badly.
this is the other thing linux communities are well-known for: blaming the user for not being good enough.
i think the last time my linux failed to boot there was a power outage...but the machine was a laptop. before that it was running an update (fedora/nobara). before that it was installing void ("installation complete" -> reboot ->grub recovery). before that it was running an update (pop_os). Before that it was running an update (manjaro, this was during a brief moment when it was very popular and linux folks claimed it was user friendly and suitable for moderate users). I've managed to recover from most of those cases listed above, but with the exception of manjaro that was 2023+2024 right there.
I said your friend is an idiot, not you. And even in his case, i only really blamed him for literally intentionally messing shit up. Should I remind you that you're the one who said that story? Congrats on winning your argument against a strawman i guess?
The second paragraph of your answer just tells me you have never had an idea of what you're doing. And that would be totally fine if you didn't blame it on Linux as a whole, btw. But you do just that.
Why would you use everything except the most obvious distro choices? Manjaro is literally famous for terrible practices, always has been. 5 minutes of research would tell you that much. You try nobara but not vanilla fedora?? You try pop_os but not Linux Mint? You try Void for some reason?? Fkin Void? You're clearly not really ready to tinker and you want stuff to just work, so just go with something obviously and famously stable and out of the box like Linux Mint. It's really that simple... You complicate shit for yourself and then complain about how you've had terrible experiences. Ofc you've had them because you never really bothered to try and keep it simple for yourself.
I always choose the practical solution over anything else. And there are real problems in Linux right now, like fractional scaling on GNOME, VR, HDR being hit or miss, anticheat not working, etc. So i don't force anybody onto Linux. But pretending we're still in 1995 is just malicious coming from you.
If you're just lost about shit, people in the Linux community are generally ready to help. Hell, if you describe your use cases well, literally everybody would help you as much as they can. But coming on here and using a wild (and probably fake) story to flame something for no real reason and then expecting a positive response is kind of weird, don't you think?
Edit: sorry, wrong user i guess. You all haters kind of blend in and look the same lol.
I won't bother responding to your hate fueled rage post except to say those are all highly recommended distros, except Manjaro which I've already stated was hot at the time. Void for example is the no-contest top rated distro right now. When the "best" Linux has to offer won't get past grub from their install wizard, that's not an incompetence issue.
Look man, irrespective of who i originally intended to reply to, you responded to me by saying I was simply blaming the user. Which clearly wasn't the case. If you think his initial anecdote at all is realistic, then you haven't really used any well established distro in a while. Accessing an SMB share especially is very very straightforward right now if nothing else.
Void is a distro that doesn't use systemd. That alone would put it out of the contest, let alone being the top-rated distro... It's fine to not understand why that is, but again, you could have just asked on any community. Again man, stop complicating stuff for yourself... And I never said you're incompetent, you're probably really good at this stuff, I feel like you just haven't taken the time to read through and understand. And again, even that would be fine, just don't blame Linux in its entirety. Linux is too broad to be blamed in its entirety.
If you go by hype alone, NixOS is probably the most popular distro right now, doesn't mean I'm going to recommend it to you.
Use an actually well-established distribution like Fedora, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Ubuntu or Linux mint. Use Plasma if you can. Use Flatpaks for packages where possible and use the native repository otherwise. It's pretty much that easy these days. I even use the Steam flatpak for gaming nowadays. Grass is pretty green over here now, and I'm saying that as someone who does still use Windows. I use Windows both at work and for certain games. So it's not like I'm out of touch either.
Sorry if that post felt rage fueled by the way, didn't mean it that way and wasn't in rage either. I'm just bad with conveying stuff, especially with English not being my first language :)
My Nas is a standard truenas scale installation with standard SMB shares that all my windows computers pick up instantly without any or extremely limited fiddling.
I'm not some nooblet that doesn't know shit, tyvm. I've been using computers for decades.
I don't expect a one to one translation between using windows and Linux, but I do expect basic functionalities to be, well, functional out if the box.