I'm in that older+longer cohort so I'll comment...
I think you are talking about workflow-breaking changes or stability issues during transitions to newer Linux bits. You explicitly excluded hardware/driver issues that a lot of people gripe about with Linux on laptops. I think your experience here can vary dramatically depending on your choice of Linux distribution, your upgrade tempo, and your expectations.
I've had some frustrations with the UEFI transition and secure boot, because it forced me do research when I just wanted my system to boot. I've similarly suffered some regressions with MATE recently, where it boots to a black screen and I had to dig around to find that switching to a text console and restarting lightdm would get it unstuck. I'm struggling to answer whether these are "driver" things or not.
But, I've been on Fedora for ~20 years now and am happily oblivious to Flatpak, Snap, or even Docker because they have nothing to do with my day to day experience. I also don't think I've dipped my toes into Wayland yet. I've been using XFCE or the MATE desktop rather than GNOME. But I do remember when ALSA was the new thing, then pulseaudio, and now pipewire. I mostly didn't care unless trying to setup some specific sound peripheral. I never had btrfs anywhere except an experimental system, because I always customized partitioning and never really considered the defaults to matter.
If I exclude hardware/driver issues, it seems like this same story applies to Windows. It all depends on what part of the ecosystem you consider to be part of your platform experience. Some people might have some favorite apps that essentially work the same as 25 years ago, while others have experienced multiple upheavals as third parties abandoned or hijacked an old favorite application or forced some kind of migration. It's only gotten worse with all the rent-seeking cloud integrations with everything.
I think you are talking about workflow-breaking changes or stability issues during transitions to newer Linux bits. You explicitly excluded hardware/driver issues that a lot of people gripe about with Linux on laptops. I think your experience here can vary dramatically depending on your choice of Linux distribution, your upgrade tempo, and your expectations.
I've had some frustrations with the UEFI transition and secure boot, because it forced me do research when I just wanted my system to boot. I've similarly suffered some regressions with MATE recently, where it boots to a black screen and I had to dig around to find that switching to a text console and restarting lightdm would get it unstuck. I'm struggling to answer whether these are "driver" things or not.
But, I've been on Fedora for ~20 years now and am happily oblivious to Flatpak, Snap, or even Docker because they have nothing to do with my day to day experience. I also don't think I've dipped my toes into Wayland yet. I've been using XFCE or the MATE desktop rather than GNOME. But I do remember when ALSA was the new thing, then pulseaudio, and now pipewire. I mostly didn't care unless trying to setup some specific sound peripheral. I never had btrfs anywhere except an experimental system, because I always customized partitioning and never really considered the defaults to matter.
If I exclude hardware/driver issues, it seems like this same story applies to Windows. It all depends on what part of the ecosystem you consider to be part of your platform experience. Some people might have some favorite apps that essentially work the same as 25 years ago, while others have experienced multiple upheavals as third parties abandoned or hijacked an old favorite application or forced some kind of migration. It's only gotten worse with all the rent-seeking cloud integrations with everything.