OS choice is irrelevant. I've seen plenty of critical linux fuck ups in my day, and OS choice doesn't account for human error. And, being human, you WILL make human errors. You need a test environment and a backout plan. If you don't at least have a back-out plan and an estimate of how much the fuckup will cost BEFORE proceeding (and balancing that against the cost/risk of leaving it the fuck alone), you should not be carrying out the work.
Sure, that sounds like management speak, but seriously... cover your fucking ass. Because one day it will fuck up (whatever, the OS, this isn't just a Linux or Windows problem) and whilst the fuck up may not necessarily be your fault, the extended downtime because you have not tested and have no backout plan will be.
Yup. Although, that said, if you have a proper test environment, like say, a snap-clone of your live environment and an isolated test VLAN, you can do significant testing on copies of live systems and be pretty confident it will work. You can figure out your back-out plan, which may be as simple as rolling back to a snapshot (or possibly not).
Way too many environments have no test environment, but these days with the mass deployment of FAS/SAN and virtualization, you owe it to your team to get that shit set up.
We are experiencing system trouble -- do not adjust your terminal.