it's impossible to keep up with all of the changes

Literally not true. It's all handled for you. You could use a stable system like Debian or Gentoo for years without updating or only getting security patches or use a rolling system and get all the updates easily. No one says you've gotta reinstall your system all the time. Every distro has some way to keep up with updates. It's not like you've gotta compile every program yourself and pull the git repo every few days or reinstall your OS every year.

Way Too Many Choices

Linux's biggest obstacle is the paradox of choice

If you are scared of the options available for Linux, you are ignorant. It's understandable some people get anxiety when presented with too many equal options, but the thing is they have to be equal options. This is not the case in the Linux world. The options are all different. You as a user will want different things than other users. You may not have thought about what you want, but you do have wants. You have an idea of how you want to use your computer. It's a matter of doing a Google search to find what option provides your choice. It's not like choosing between 5 ice cream flavors you all like; it's like choosing what to eat between ice cream, vomit, feces, a rock, and a block of wood. There's a clear right choice. If you really believe that there are an overwhelming amount of choices of Linux, you are simply ignorant of the most basic UX differences. Like, you haven't even tried to compare. You just heard "there are 2 things" and panicked.

I'm really tired of this stupid myth of too much fragmentation in Linux that gets passed around. There's a reason for the fragmentation; it's not arbitrary, so it doesn't hurt to have it. We're talking bare minimum looking stuff up or asking a question.

Why? Because Linux is high maintenance.

Only true if you mess with stuff. If you're a newcomer and just want stuff to work. Pick some common, stable OS like Ubuntu, use flatpaks or snaps, and it will just work.

I did nothing out of the ordinary -- yet somehow it ended up breaking my desktop. The result? Neither Unity nor Gnome worked properly, so I went back to Windows to cool off... and haven't been back to Linux since.

Ah okay, this article was written nearly a decade ago. That checks out. There were several significant improvements to Linux around 5 years ago or so.

But also, "nothing out of the ordinary?" Installing a totally new desktop environment is "nothing out of the ordinary?" It's something you can't even do on Mac and Windows!

Software Quality Is Mostly Sub-Par

Just untrue. There are tons of fantastic FOSS apps out there with better UX than I get even from proprietary apps. Another myth that has 0 Google searching behind it. I mean look at the GNOME apps. They're all really really good for the most part.

This probably also comes from the age of the article too. A lot of that came like 5 or so years ago. There were some big pushes.

There are some important proprietary apps that are unavailable with no great alternatives like Photoshop, that's fair, but for FOSS apps that are just trying to do what they want to do, there's some with great UI.