Plus points for using strace. It's one of those debugging tools everyone know about for emergencies that can't be solved at a higher level, and a great convenience of using Linux. The Windows ETW system is much harder to use, and I'm not sure if it's even possible at all under OSX security.
I have solved an incredible number of problems just by looking at strace output very carefully. Strace combined with Wireshark or Tcpdump are incredible as a toolset for capturing what a program is doing and for capturing what the effect is either on the USB or the NIC.
You usually don't need that full industrial level tracing though on Windows! Process Monitor is 95% of the solution for most people, and provides very similar functionality to strace, if a lot easier to read.