[isityettime]

Only a little over 20 years of Linux experience here. A few years ago, I daily drove Windows for work after not touching it for a decade. There were way more unsolvable riddles in that year on Windows than in my lifetime of desktop Linux usage. And no one else at the company really knew how to dig into their Windows systems, either; the mysteries I solved were all things I had to solve myself.

IME Windows people actually do root cause analysis on the behavior of their systems somewhere between rarely and never. There's a high background level of mystery and superstition on Windows that even highly technical computing professionals on Windows are habituated to. In contrast, that's something that just a few years of daily Linux usage made not only unnecessary for me, but unacceptable to me.

Every time I return to Windows I'm a little bit optimistic... and then it becomes clear to me that I've forgotten how bad it can actually be.

[marysol5]

Thank you! This is exactly my position too.

I came through with Windows certs, but had always been a Linux guy, and now work entirely with Linux. Windows people don't actually solve problems, hence the joke about "Turn it off and on again", making it into mainstream.

You will very rarely see a Windows person open up a debugger, unless they're an actual developer. Meanwhile on Linux you can peek inside the process that's hanging and see what it's borked on.

Oh no, the NFS mount has dropped and the process is stuck trying to read it!

Oh no, reboot

[nijave]

>Meanwhile on Linux you can peek inside the process that's hanging and see what it's borked on.

Windows has pretty robust tooling to do the same, even if no one uses it. Process Monitor (procmon) will trivially tell you the same on Windows. Arguably the GUI is easier to use than strace since you can both proactively and retroactively apply filters. Main issue is letting it run too long and eating up a bunch of RAM with the event buffer

[isityettime]

Ages ago I was a PC tech intern at a Windows shop, investigating bluescreens on some Dell mini PC, which I'd never really done before. Some time after I installed WinDbg and started downloading some debug symbols, one of the fulltime guys came by and said "just reinstall Windows". I'd just pinpointed the crash to some driver without figuring out more details at that time. I did it, but I was a little bit heartbroken because I knew that meant I'd never have a clear picture of what had gone wrong.

There's a real cost/benefit question involved in root cause analysis, of course. But that childhood experience turned out to be representative of what I'd continue to witness in the rest of my professional life. When you always choose expedient ignorance, you end up living and working without ever having a clear idea of what your computer is doing, and each investigation feels like another Herculean task you're obliged to skip.

[nijave]

Back when I used Windows I prided myself in my install age. Can't remember if I started on XP but at least made it from 7, 8, 8.1, to 10 over many years, repairing issues as they came up.

DISM largely does the same thing as reinstall without nuking all your files/settings assuming you can get it pointed at a valid source if winsxs doesn't have the thing it needs.

[bigstrat2003]

That just isn't true. Windows admins are just like any other. Most are sharp dudes who know stuff, some few are slackers who don't learn.