Earlier quoted context omitted.
Different design goals. While there's tension between Windows/Linux (which, interestingly, has over the years partly been released by each adopting pages of the others' playbook) there are a lot of complex or critical systems in the world, where displaying an error message to the user is clearly not a great design choice.
Yes, and some people just want to take their car to the mechanic, while other people want to fix theirs. It's a classic struggle in any area. The big difference though, is if I use my car in a professional capacity , I want to know how to change my own oil, because I'm not an idiot. I want to be able to fix simple issues, because that's just being professionally responsible. Windows discourages this kind of professio…
Microsoft had extensive documentation of nearly every API they support, and some they don't. Comprehensive documentation with notes and caveats. Automatically available from their tools.
Compare, for instance, with Apples almost total non-documentation of anything. Mostly just scraped comments with arguments barely described e.g 'a string'. No notes, no architecture, nothing.