There's something I've heard a lot over the years. It's a common complaint that Win32 developers express when they first come to an Open Source development environment (such as Linux with its myriad of Free Software/Open Source development tools). This common complaint is that the development documentation is somehow lacking compared to the Win32 development documentation. Generally, they point to MSDN as the gold standard and bemoan Linux's lack of something similar. This complaint is even one of the motivating factors for the LSB project (which, I used to be a part of).

Whenever I have heard this complaint in the past, it has always made me laugh. I've laughed because the development documentation for Linux and its Free Software/Open Source ilk tends to be very good... you just have to know where to look for it. You have to be comfortable reading man pages, browsing info documents, snooping through /usr/doc, etcetera, etcetera. True, it's not all available in one web site, but more often than not it's more convenient to get at in the end (much of it can be accessed quickly from the command line).

Well, after an ordeal I've had today trying to solve a simple, and common, problem with my XNA-based video game using MSDN, I will laugh even harder when I encounter Win32-weenies with this complaint in the future...