Great article. I love Windows deep dives—both because of the supposed inaccessibility of Windows (clearly not true), and because Windows is something I've daily-driven for 23 years, and I've come to really appreciate.
If only MS could get its act straight, clean up its UI framework mess (WinUI, WPF, WinForms, Win32, WinRT, MAUI... sheesh) and stop applying stupid regressive updates and dark patterns.
> because of the supposed inaccessibility of Windows (clearly not true)
It's a mixed bag and it's far from not true. You get great tools for performance debugging, you get some system symbols, got get system wide tracing... Unless you don't get the symbols. And even then, you often find the element which doesn't work properly and... that's all. Now you know what fails, but not why and you can't do anything about it anyway.
I keep getting disappointed like that by windows over and over. I find what fails and it doesn't actually change anything.
The debugging tools and symbols are mostly available, but that we can't verify why these bugs happen or fix them is down to the closed-source nature of Windows, then, isn't it?
Another pipe dream to add to the pile: open-source Windows.
I am 100% sure it will happen someday.
It's been in the process of happening, albeit very slowly, since 1996: https://reactos.org/
I've heard of ReactOS, and it's not what I meant—the 'pipe dream' was Microsoft itself open-sourcing Windows and all its components, from the NT kernel to every single tiny program in Windows, like the various MMC plug-ins, Aero shell, Explorer, Task Manager, etc.
It's highly unlikely, ergo 'pipe dream'.