I mean, yes, there popups. But my linux installation does exactly that too, every login I get software update popup by default and if I don't want to see it I need to change options manually (and update settings in linux are far from trivial).
As for bad upgrades - I had linux upgrades which failed something in the video path and I was stuck with broken X server and no GUI. And I didn't manage to repair that state even after extensive searching on stack exchange, so I just deleted everything and reinstalled. Another time I tried to install custom software and ended in a error hell of incompatible versions of libc, libtrpc etc. and it simply didn't work (it was on Debian), but at the same it worked just fine on another VM with different distributive.
As for bad upgrades - I had linux upgrades which failed something in the video path and I was stuck with broken X server and no GUI. And I didn't manage to repair that state even after extensive searching on stack exchange, so I just deleted everything and reinstalled. Another time I tried to install custom software and ended in a error hell of incompatible versions of libc, libtrpc etc. and it simply didn't work (it was on Debian), but at the same it worked just fine on another VM with different distributive.
No OS is perfect currently.