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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. :(



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.


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.


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/administrat...

If you're learning, start with the official windows docs. They are often very good.


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.




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