• MS products are closed-source, so the error messages don’t need to be meaningful for the end user, because they can’t do much with them, anyway. The error messages are for MS engineers who have books they can look up the secret codes in.

    Since Linux is open source, error messages need to be approached from a different angle. Every end user is a potential contributor to the project, so you want error messages that are meaningful so they can troubleshoot it.