Or perhaps it could be something other than malice?

This person is putting up with a misbehavior they don’t have to live with. They’re presenting the perception that it’s due to the nature of the operating system.

My Toyota engine dies when I idle, therefore all Toyotas and fundamentally flawed.

Flawed logic, no? And yet, when it comes to tech, plenty of folks apply the same type of thought pattern.

You’re right that one would think the issue is as it seems on the surface. Computers are actually a bit more complicated than that.

One fail mode of memory is the occasional bit flip silently corrupting data in the background. As time goes on and new data is written to a disk, things can get weirder and weirder over time.

We don’t know if Windows and Linux are sharing a physical disk (I hope for their sake they aren’t) and we don’t know how old the Linux deployment is, so it’s possible it hasn’t had the opportunity to get progressively messed up enough yet.

Another key variable is that the Linux environment might not be interacting with every single piece of hardware, or that the structure of those interactions could result in symptoms manifesting differently or not at all.

I’ve had situations where a MacBook’s keyboard and trackpad were completely functional in Linux and Windows, but absolutely dysfunctional in any MacOS based environment. The fix? Replacement trackpad cable.

At the end of the day, the situation they’re describing is not common for the OS and indicates something is very wrong.

A device with those symptoms coming through my shop is statistically likely to be leaving with replaced parts, a component level repair, or at the very least a complete OS and Driver reinstallation after passing extensive diagnostic testing and behavioral isolation.