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.
Now, 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.”
I appreciate its honesty and sympathise with the general sense of unease it imparts – I say something similar myself, looking at the state of the world – but surely it’s the software’s job to know what’s wrong – or at least pretend it does!
Here’s the dialog in question, in situ (an older screenshot, if anyone’s paying close attention – I didn’t take a screen snap the most recent time):
App Center‘s (or App Centre; I’ve forgotten which is the British spelling) has had a general air of off-ness since it arrived in 2023 as it’s written in Flutter, but styled to look like a GTK app. It looks like it should behave the way other apps that look like it do, but it doesn’t.
Buttons are a little too far from their labels, resize the window and content doesn’t reflows as well as it could, there’s wasted space, odd font sizes, unorthodox spinners, non-standard sidebars and the many glitches, upside down windows, wrong colours, etc., related to GPU rendering.
And, from an end-user perspective, it’s not a destination in the way Flathub and desktop Flatpak managers like the brilliant Bazaar are. App Center’s homepage is rote, with all the curated enthusiasm of a forwarded chain e-mail.
I could hand-wave the (many) quirks away if this 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 our Snap and Debian packages – and, soon, drivers – with.
It ought to be better.
To compound the pointlessness of this “unknown error” error nothing seemed to break or go wrong after the dialog appeared, not that I could tell. If the app is unable to identify what went wrong, fine, but could it at least check if something critical 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 this pithy paper-cut opine, the error doesn’t appear often and snaps update automatically in the background without user input, so it’s not like this is impacting day-to-day usage.
Nor am 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? As is, it looks careless and sloppy. Like the people who make it, don’t use it.
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 don’t get fewer errors going forward, we at least get more helpful ones.