Bug#831890: "Oh no, something has gone wrong" message is incredibly user-hostile

[Steve McIntyre]

Source: gnome-shell
Severity: important
Tags: upstream

Hi,

In the Debian installfest at DebConf 16, an all-defaults installation
onto a brand-new laptop worked just fine until after first boot. It
then failed to do anything useful for the new user at all, instead
just showing an incredibly annoying "you're too stupid to understand
this, go find an admin" style of message.

This is a massive usability failure. Without more people around with
lots more experience of how to get into the system and trawl logs to
find the underlying cause, this user would have simply walked away and
written Debian off.

This needs replacement with at least some of:

 * fallback where possible to a simple trouble-shooting screen
 * helpful messages telling the user how to reboot or otherwise get
   to a terminal, with suggestions on where to look for errors
 * real error messages that the user can google for, or pass on to
   somebody else sensibly - maybe hidden under a "details" button or
   drop-down?

There is simply no need to be so hostile here, especially not in the
default Debian desktop environment.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.5
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)