I've probably spent 2% or less of my programming career coding directly against Win32 and POSIX APIs, so I'm not the best person to be answering, but I find the

I've probably spent 2% or less of my programming career coding directly against Win32 and POSIX APIs, so I'm not the best person to be answering, but I find the other replies miss an important point. Linux developers look at the Win32 API and think it's too complex. But Win32 developers might look at Linux (or any POSIX) and think it just pushes the complexity out into user code. Someone in this thread brought up process creation (fork/exec vs. CreateProcess). fork/exec is simple, but there are a lot of pitfalls you have to be aware of. If you don't care about the result of the process, too bad, you still have to set up a SIGCHLD handler to waitpid or whatever or else you'll end up with a zombie process--which you probably won't notice, but your customers eventually will, at the most inconvenient moment. Or if your process is running as root and you want to launch a child process as a different user, you have to do this VERY carefully (calling setsid, setgid, setgroups in exactly the right order--oh and I almost forget about seteuid and setresuid, setegid and setresgid). Or take a look at writing to a socket; the individual APIs involved are all very simple but you have to know to ignore SIGPIPE or else your process will terminate if the connection is broken while you're writing. Bottom line is that when I write against Windows I spend more time reading docs, and when I write against POSIX I spend more time googling and debugging.