About Linus, I've migrated some people to Debian purely because they managed to fuck up the Ubuntu (or one of its flavours) upgrade somehow... and those were not linux-illiterate people. I dunno what it is but Ubuntu have weirdly higher rate of fuckups on upgrade than we've seen with Debian. Hell, it even survived that one time one of our admins upgraded by 2 releases of debian at once...
Might be conjecture based on small sample size I have for Debian, but what Linus was doing shouldn't really fuck anything up... Steam package in Debian "just installed"
In my experience, DEB distros have somehow been more stable than RPM ones, but Debian and Ubuntu wouldn't be an order of magnitude off from one another (aside from Ubuntu giving you more leeway in regards to proprietary software out of the box).
Well, maybe apart from the whole "snap" debacle, which is more of an architectural issue in my eyes, going around the package manager (and even then doing it in a way that's a bit more counter-culture than what AppImage or Flatpak does; even if I can understand their desire for automatic updates).
Then again, I have no issue using Docker containers and actually liked older Ubuntu LTS Unity desktop environment (which was stable in my experience, contrary to what others experienced), so maybe I'm a bit of an oddball here.
This could have been something as simple as bad install media, ignoring dpkg error messages, incompatible package versions if something was manually installed, etc.
Linux these days is quite a bit easier, but there are still edge cases that can cause problems.
Might be conjecture based on small sample size I have for Debian, but what Linus was doing shouldn't really fuck anything up... Steam package in Debian "just installed"