[alexjplant]

> Kubuntu treats you like an adult and will tell you what's going on

This means so much to me in the modern era. Contrast with the SaaS approach that's also been leaking into Electron apps, etc:

- "Something went wrong"

- "It's not you - it's us :-("

- "An error occurred"

- "Uh-oh..."

- "Too many penguins are in the defrobulator" [or whatever "lol so random" 2010 corporate mascot in-joke is applicable]

People used to make jokes about cryptic error messages with alphanumeric codes but cryptic beats cutesy and completely uninformative every day of the week. The days of people being intimidated by computers have been over for a while now so I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.

[ratelimitsteve]

I think it was Woz that said something along the lines of 'the problem with making a computer that stupid people can use is that only stupid people will want to use it'. arrogant, no doubt, but also also rather prophetic now that we're in the era of "Whoopsydingdangdoodle, we made a booboo with your request" meaninglessness. I think we've traded being intimidated by computers for being completely agnostic as to how they work and just not caring. They've gotten easier and more reliable, sure, but they've also gotten more opaque, less transparent, less extensible and less fixable because of it. Those of us who grew up in the era where you had to become pretty intimate with the details of how a computer worked in order to get it to do anything at all developed a lot of skills for dealing with issues and now those skills are being intentionally obsoleted by design decisions that remove our ability to actually fix things ourselves by hiding everything about the apps we run except the interface.

[yuye]

"Can websites please stop the trend of giving error messages that are like "OOPSIE WOOPSIE!! Uwu We made a fucky wucky!! A wittle fucko boingo! The code monkeys at our headquarters are working VEWY HAWD to fix this!" And just give me a fucking error code so I can try and fix it"[0]

[0] https://x.com/cherrikissu/status/972524442600558594

[klez]

> The days of people being intimidated by computers have been over for a while now so I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Oh, I wish...

We have a couple of applications where we used to show useful error messages that users could copy-paste to us when they opened a ticket. We had to remove them because they scared some users. Now, per our customer's request, we sometimes only show "ERROR". Yeah, that's better...

Also, in the ticketing system we have to hide technical messages when passing the ticket between teams because the user would interject telling us they don't understand (which is ok, to a point: they have all the context they need to understand we're not talking to them, but ok...) but some would get really angry and frustrated and complain to our customer's IT that they don't want to see the technical stuff.

Also, my parents that get scared if something in red with numbers shows up on their screens.

[2b3a51]

Perhaps 'Error' in tasteful smoked glass overlay, but with a QR code that encodes an error number?

(Spent some time last year supporting students online - noone was going to take a screen shot of their laptop so we ended up with them emailing photos off their phones)

[OldManLiver]

I remember when BugZilla reported "Zarro boogs found". My reaction was to ask that we switch to some software that didn't act like it was a 13 year old nerd.