This design seems to cement the trend at Apple to position their products as consumer appliances, not platforms useful for development.
The problem is, there's nothing else out there. Everything is going to shit in one way or another. Windows is now a disaster, Linux was always a disaster in terms of user experience and isn't improving.
Mac OS was the last bastion of somewhat good, thoughtful design, user experience and attention to detail and now they've gone to shit too.
Curious: what have you tried? People who use "Linux" as a catch-all in terms of UX usually have only tried a single distribution with a single desktop environment.
I had an ubuntu machine that took a while to boot even with an SSD. Later I installed arch linux on the same machine and boom! it would be to the desktop in seconds. It was night and day.
Rolling updates for me have not been problematic.
I've had a few updates that gave an error message, and they were easily fixed in one minute after searching the arch website.
I think one was a key expired - I had to manually update it and redo the update process.
The other I can recall was a package that had become obsolete/conflicting and a question had to be answered.
In general rolling updates are a tiny blip every few months.
In comparison, the several debian based distributions I've run have been a "lost weekend" type of upgrade for major updates.