I think the point is that the stuff on the symbol servers corresponds to the binaries used in the wild by the people who first encounter these issues. On Linux

I think the point is that the stuff on the symbol servers corresponds to the binaries used in the wild by the people who first encounter these issues. On Linux, you might run into the problem of a distro shipping stripped binaries, which means having the source code doesn't help much in parsing a stack or profiler trace. Instead, you need to track down the debug info for the binaries as compiled and shipped by that particular distro. Even in the best case, that will be more work than Microsoft's single-source symbol server.