One smart thing I think Microsoft did was try to give every error message a code.
Googling for “gpoopapp E0013” is often easier and gets more precise results than having to type in “gpoopapp The file /home/bitchslayer69420/.config/share/whatever.yaml could not be opened: File not found”
But in the latter case you don’t have to google. You already know what the problem is. The file it’s looking for is missing. So I’d rather have that kind of message than just an error code.
You definitely have to go to the Arch wikiGoogle in some cases.
Knowing what the problem is and knowing how to fix it are sometimes seemingly unrelated.
E.g., “Could not open foo.yaml: File not found” could actually mean “Some non-obvious file in the tarball was not set executable, which screwed up this one script that ran another script but couldn’t run some other script which didn’t give an error message, which made another script think the file had already been copied”.
If you can find someone out there who ran into exactly the same problem, you can find a solution to it, but if none of the words in your error message are completely unique, it can be very hard to find someone with the same problem.
One smart thing I think Microsoft did was try to give every error message a code. Googling for “gpoopapp E0013” is often easier and gets more precise results than having to type in “gpoopapp The file /home/bitchslayer69420/.config/share/whatever.yaml could not be opened: File not found”
Unfortunately, the SEO hellscape means every single windows error just yield a “Try to install our patcher tool” article.
How about both?
But in the latter case you don’t have to google. You already know what the problem is. The file it’s looking for is missing. So I’d rather have that kind of message than just an error code.
You definitely have to
go to the Arch wikiGoogle in some cases. Knowing what the problem is and knowing how to fix it are sometimes seemingly unrelated. E.g., “Could not open foo.yaml: File not found” could actually mean “Some non-obvious file in the tarball was not set executable, which screwed up this one script that ran another script but couldn’t run some other script which didn’t give an error message, which made another script think the file had already been copied”. If you can find someone out there who ran into exactly the same problem, you can find a solution to it, but if none of the words in your error message are completely unique, it can be very hard to find someone with the same problem.