>> I am sorry if it sounded harsh, but constantly reading about novice problems I haven't had in a decade also doesn't "sound good reading".
It's not a novice problem. I know what a fsck is and I know you're not supposed to unmount filesystems improperly. But you shouldn't be presented with an error that you can't recover without a rescue USB because your system lost power.
And the video configuration issues are just weird. Monitors plug and play perfectly but all of a sudden it got so screwed up, I had to poke around quite a bit to get things back to normal. Frustrating the heck out of me because I'm used to something that just worked.
I am not saying this didn't happen to you, but it looks like a fluke or a distro specific bug, since I specifically had power outages while running my Arch home server and haven't had to recover from USB.
Actually Windows can and does use NTFS transactions (TxF) in the Installer and Updater code, so the probability of non-recoverable damage should be lower (which is also my experience; power off a Linux machine during updates and you are pretty much guaranteed to have many packages with empty files, partial file trees and so on; power off a Windows machine and it probably is still fine, but sometimes you get weird issues where it can't properly reinstall/deinstall some updates to try again).
It's not a novice problem. I know what a fsck is and I know you're not supposed to unmount filesystems improperly. But you shouldn't be presented with an error that you can't recover without a rescue USB because your system lost power.
And the video configuration issues are just weird. Monitors plug and play perfectly but all of a sudden it got so screwed up, I had to poke around quite a bit to get things back to normal. Frustrating the heck out of me because I'm used to something that just worked.