Different design goals. While there's tension between Windows/Linux (which, interestingly, has over the years partly been released by each adopting pages of the others' playbook) there are a lot of complex or critical systems in the world, where displaying an error message to the user is clearly not a great design choice.
Yes, and some people just want to take their car to the mechanic, while other people want to fix theirs. It's a classic struggle in any area. The big difference though, is if I use my car in a professional capacity, I want to know how to change my own oil, because I'm not an idiot. I want to be able to fix simple issues, because that's just being professionally responsible.
Windows discourages this kind of professional responsibility, hides everything it can that would give you an inkling of what's going on under the hood. Microsoft wants you to be dependent on them for doing ANYTHING out of the ordinary. And of course, when anything out of the ordinary occurs, there is wailing and gnashing of teeth from millions of windows users, billions of dollars lost by their employers, and all the Linux users just stare in disbelief that y'all don't know how to change your own oil. If you use a computer for work, should probably know how it works. Microsoft has intentionally made it difficult, so... Have you tried Linux, the backbone of modern computing, installed on more devices than Windows by at least a factor of two?
Microsoft had extensive documentation of nearly every API they support, and some they don't. Comprehensive documentation with notes and caveats. Automatically available from their tools.
Compare, for instance, with Apples almost total non-documentation of anything. Mostly just scraped comments with arguments barely described e.g 'a string'. No notes, no architecture, nothing.
Yes, my comment contained more hyperbole than it should have; I was frustrated at the idea of "hiding information about a problem" as a good design goal, and let that frustration influence my writing. Apologies to jstummbillig for that. Thank you for being the voice of reason in the room, Joe.
Interesting, I've never found Microsoft documentation for Windows thorough enough to reason about a problem, especially when compared to Arch or Gentoo's docs. I always feel like I'm reading the abstract of a paper, with no access to the rest of it. Is there some kind of special access or login requirement for deeper documentation, or am I just spoiled by the great Linux docs?
Apple products are the king of the "you don't own your device" mantra. I just refuse to develop anything for them, because the time expense of trying to guess how to get the OS to comply hasn't been worth the reward. That being said, I've found the documentation for Swift to be extremely good, better than most other languages I work with.
Yeah Microsoft is definitely not much better than a walled garden for much of their technology.
I was privileged(?) to have access to source under license for years, contracting with a company that ported Windows to various industrial platforms. So my view is similarly colored.
