I recently re-encountered my favourite ‘error’ dialog in Ubuntu, which is thrown by the distro’s App Center (snap-store), which is the default GUI software management tool.
I don’t see it often, but when I do it (un)helpfully informs me: “Something went wrong. We’re sorry, but we’re not sure what the error is.”
While I sympathise with its honesty and the general sense of unease in imparts – I say something similar, looking at the state of the world right now – isn’t it the software’s job to know what’s wrong?
You can see the dialog in question here, in situ (an older screenshot, if anyone’s paying that much attention – I didn’t take a screen snap the most recent time, but had a few older ones to hand):
Admittedly, App Center has had a general air of off-ness since it arrived in 2023. As a desktop app written in Flutter, but styled to look like a native GTK app, it sticks out because of the uncanniness; it looks like it should behave the way other apps that look like it do, but it doesn’t.
Buttons sit a little too far from their labels, resize the window and nothing reflows as well as it could, there’s lots of wasted space, inconsistent font sizes, unorthodox spinners – plus the many glitches, upside down windows and strange colours, hardware depending.
And compared to Flathub – and desktop Flatpak managers like the brilliant Bazaar – App Center’s homepage has the curated enthusiasm of an automated chain e-mail.
I could hand-wave the (many) quirks away if App Center was a rarely-touched utility lurking in the bowels of the System folder. It’s not. It’s the GUI Canonical wants us all to install and manage Snap and Debian packages – and, soon, drivers.
It ought to be better.
Compounding the pointlessness of the “unknown error” error: nothing seemed to break or go wrong after the dialog was shown, not that I could tell. If the app is unable to identify what stopped working, fine, but could it at least check if something has?
As is, it gives me a shoulder shrug of nothing. What am I supposed to do with no information? Its job?!
To keep perspective in the pithy paper-cut opine, this error doesn’t appear often, and most snaps update automatically in the background.
I’m not suggesting App Center should fire a stack trace to Canonical each time it is “not sure”. This is moving a lot of pieces; some of what goes wrong may, indeed, be hard to summarise1.
But is this a helpful message for the main GUI package manager2 on a major desktop operating system, developed by a company that is staffed by a lot of very talented engineers, to show users?
It gives nothing.
With App Center adding a new drivers page in Ubuntu 26.10, making it possible to install, view and manage GPU and other free and non-free drivers graphically, my main hope is that if we can’t get fewer errors going forward, we at least get more helpful ones.