Do end-users really mess with partitioning usually (outside of formatting brand new disks I suppose)? I'm not asking rhetorically, I suppose there must be a use case if MS implemented this (tricky) feature but I can't really imagine any of my non-techies friends and relative decide to shrink a partition (actually most of them probably aren't aware of the concept of partition in the first place).
Now personnaly I find it weird, I would rather use the excuse to wipe and start clean if root, and for non root just making the partition you want and copy the content instead feels cleaner, but is it fairly common nonetheless.
They indeed don't know the concept of partitions, but they google "replace my hard drive by a larger one" and follow a guide usually (and such guide contains link to a specific duplicate took they can buy, of course).
More generally, I was trying to approximate "the set of users who aren't solely sysadmins of remote systems". Substitute for it whatever word you see fit.
And I never suggested a developer would be incapable of following these. Seems like you got so sidetracked in arguing that you forgot what the discussion was actually about. See my original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19357672
If this is still the case then it's not really a far comparison to Windows because you could then do the same thing from a boot media in Linux (ie boot into it, resize and you're done). In fact you probably could also do that via a GUI (maybe gparted?).
In any case I do agree that Linux does still leave a lot to be desired when it comes to making some of the more advanced file system operations far more complicated for end users than they need to be.
Not if all you're doing is shrinking from the end. When was the last time you tried? I'm guessing the XP days?
To be fair, it might have been. I'm not a heavy Windows user but the fact I can't recall the last time I resized the system volume probably says more about how long ago it was.