The things is you really can’t be that good with windows.
Sure you can get good with registry and group policy and other stuff that is needlessly complicated to do relatively simple stuff. You can know your way around WMI and .net and powershell…
But at some point, the software actively hides the specifics of what is wrong. You can’t crack open something to see why it’s showing some ambigious hexadecimal code or a plain screen. You can’t add tracing to step through their code to see what unexpected condition they hit that they didn’t prepare to handle. On Linux you are likely to be able to plainly see a stack trace, download the source code, maybe trace it, modify the source code.
Windows is like welding the hood shut and wondering why mechanics have a hard time with the car.
As someone who works as a sysadmin/systems engineer in a Windows environment, I find your analogy is a bit extreme. Not denying the issue, it’s a constant frustration and problem. It’s just that I find you can get a lot farther than most people think.
So less “hood’s welded shut” and more “Why the fuck are the headlights a single unit? I just need to fix the high beams! Why is the transmission welded shut? Who in the fuck wired the radio and power steering together? And why in the hell is none of this documented anywhere?” Maybe that’s worse, tbh. You can get very deep, but most of it is horrors.
Guess it’s a matter of degree, that was the sort of stuff I was alluding to in the first part, that you have all this convoluted instrumentation that you can dig into, and as you say perhaps even more maddening because at some times it’s needlessly over complicating something simple, and then at just the wrong time it tries to simplify something and ends up sealing off just the flexibility you might need.
Yes indeed! There are a lot of tricks old Windows admins still hold onto to get stuff done and sometimes it’s so damn frustrating (like resorting to BITS to move files at times).
The things is you really can’t be that good with windows.
Sure you can get good with registry and group policy and other stuff that is needlessly complicated to do relatively simple stuff. You can know your way around WMI and .net and powershell…
But at some point, the software actively hides the specifics of what is wrong. You can’t crack open something to see why it’s showing some ambigious hexadecimal code or a plain screen. You can’t add tracing to step through their code to see what unexpected condition they hit that they didn’t prepare to handle. On Linux you are likely to be able to plainly see a stack trace, download the source code, maybe trace it, modify the source code.
Windows is like welding the hood shut and wondering why mechanics have a hard time with the car.
As someone who works as a sysadmin/systems engineer in a Windows environment, I find your analogy is a bit extreme. Not denying the issue, it’s a constant frustration and problem. It’s just that I find you can get a lot farther than most people think.
So less “hood’s welded shut” and more “Why the fuck are the headlights a single unit? I just need to fix the high beams! Why is the transmission welded shut? Who in the fuck wired the radio and power steering together? And why in the hell is none of this documented anywhere?” Maybe that’s worse, tbh. You can get very deep, but most of it is horrors.
Guess it’s a matter of degree, that was the sort of stuff I was alluding to in the first part, that you have all this convoluted instrumentation that you can dig into, and as you say perhaps even more maddening because at some times it’s needlessly over complicating something simple, and then at just the wrong time it tries to simplify something and ends up sealing off just the flexibility you might need.
Yes indeed! There are a lot of tricks old Windows admins still hold onto to get stuff done and sometimes it’s so damn frustrating (like resorting to BITS to move files at times).