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One thing I have trouble with in windows is debugging problems. If say I plug in a usb device and nothing happens, I know what logs to look at, and they are ver

One thing I have trouble with in windows is debugging problems. If say I plug in a usb device and nothing happens, I know what logs to look at, and they are verbose and if I don't, I can search the internet and find five or six possible solutions depending on distro and age. In windows the search generally says "download this malware and it will solve your problem", "restore to a save point" or "grab your install media and start over". I would be surprised if there is a good way to do the same things, they just aren't discoverable. When the device manager and services.msc show all is well, but it clearly isn't, there doesn't seem to be much advice out there. Edit: I liked vms fine, I don't think this is inheritance from that, or even dos. I knew how to debug in dos, using debug.com even. I think it has something to do with the lack of expectations for a user to be able to debug a problem. Osx has abit of this, but sitting on a bsd saves it to some extent.

ethbr0 4y ago
It's absolutely a problem. Aka the sysinternals / Bryce Cogswell and Mark Russinovich problem. To wit, Windows has plenty of debugging functionality. Historically not as extensive as Unix, but it was there. However, 0% of that was exposed in any sane way, because Microsoft...? Actually, I have no idea why it wasn't. For the price of 2 senior engineers and a willingness to actually release tools, Microsoft could have drastically improved the situation. Instead they just (eventually) bought sysinternals. :(
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  Do you have a good reference point for me to start learning that stuff? I use linux almost exclusively, but it bites me often enough it is worth a few days to self educate.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    Event Viewer has gotten a lot better over the years for surface-level stuff, but is still summary only. Which in no way mimics the *nix verbosity. I'll see if I can find a good entry point.
  - isignal 4y ago
    For logs, Windows has a standard events mechanism that many apps and the kernel itself uses. So windows event viewer is the equivalent of journalctl logs for specific services. But the gui is kind of heavy and not at all like opening a text file in less.
  - xnyan 4y ago
    There's a gui for viewing events, but you probably want to use the cli for debugging: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/wevtutil https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat... If you're learning, start with the official windows docs. They are often very good.

ethbr0 4y ago

It's absolutely a problem. Aka the sysinternals / Bryce Cogswell and Mark Russinovich problem. To wit, Windows has plenty of debugging functionality. Historically not as extensive as Unix, but it was there. However, 0% of that was exposed in any sane way, because Microsoft...? Actually, I have no idea why it wasn't. For the price of 2 senior engineers and a willingness to actually release tools, Microsoft could have drastically improved the situation. Instead they just (eventually) bought sysinternals. :(

galangalalgol 4y ago
Do you have a good reference point for me to start learning that stuff? I use linux almost exclusively, but it bites me often enough it is worth a few days to self educate.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Event Viewer has gotten a lot better over the years for surface-level stuff, but is still summary only. Which in no way mimics the *nix verbosity. I'll see if I can find a good entry point.
- isignal 4y ago
  For logs, Windows has a standard events mechanism that many apps and the kernel itself uses. So windows event viewer is the equivalent of journalctl logs for specific services. But the gui is kind of heavy and not at all like opening a text file in less.
- xnyan 4y ago
  There's a gui for viewing events, but you probably want to use the cli for debugging: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/wevtutil https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat... If you're learning, start with the official windows docs. They are often very good.