With Windows, back in the 2000s: every few days to months, whenever something broke sufficiently that I couldn't figure out how to get the system back to normal

With Windows, back in the 2000s: every few days to months, whenever something broke sufficiently that I couldn't figure out how to get the system back to normal. To be fair, I was trying out various tools and techniques to get it "just right", and these would often break things in inscrutable ways. With Ubuntu, ca. 2004-2014: every six months to a year, because almost every single dist-upgrade would result in a completely broken system (wouldn't boot or wouldn't start X). With Arch Linux, ca. 2014-2021: never, presumably because each change to the system was small and was installed by a large user base semi-simultaneously, so it was easy to figure out what had gone wrong the few times it did. With NixOS, 2021-now: none yet, but I'm worried that going back to six-monthly release cycles is going to make each upgrade as unreliable as Ubuntu was. NixOS is in many ways easier to grok than Ubuntu, but I don't yet know the most common failure modes.