It really depends. The VS debugger is excellent, and it is usually easier I agree there. But gdb is more easily scriptable and more powerful in certain situations, so I reach for gdb sometimes for the harder bugs even though I use VS more often. Of course, they don’t really compete with each other that much, since VS is mainly Windows and gdb is mainly Linux. Of course I know you can do either debugger on either OS, but in practice the debugger choice is primarily OS based.