Yeah that's exactly what Windows is like. Things normally work fine but when something goes wrong it can be a real pain and often simpler just to reinstall as Windows doesn't always give you good tools to fix it. When something goes wrong on a Linux system there is pretty much always some way of fixing it because it's an open book with good tooling for diagnostics and repair. The problem is things tend to go wrong more often or be more clunky to use in the first instance.