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Comment by GTP | Hacker News Reader

Had the journalist tryied Linux, would have known that it gives much better error messages than some random looking number.

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It literally gave the wrong error message?

> Unfortunately, according to Microsoft, "because of an error in the error code handling routine," this might not be the correct error.

Yes, and it's ironic that there's an error in the error handling routine :D

It's about one-click-solutions what makes Windows a nice-to-use-tool, not the error messages.

Exit code 139. Hm.

That's usually not the full error message, and you can still easily find the number's meaning by opening the man page of wathever piece of software terminated with that exit code.

Likewise, if you knew about err.exe, you'd also know how to be able to get the error message behind the error code.

Depends really. If it's some kind of runtime or VM you pretty much have zero idea what the exit code was. Python, CLR, JVM tend to leave you in this mire.

Yes, but remember that usually nowadays a piece of software also logs something to stderr instead of relying just on exit codes to signal error.

Not necessarily. Most of the 139's I get these days are SIGSEGV related. Obviously if you annoy the MMU at that level it's not going to get given an opportunity to write anything useful to stderr.

Yes, but sometimes useful messages can only be found in dmesg.

dmesg has been there since forever. If anything windows (auto) update has been one of the worst part, esp. when it fails to update... or worse replaces your video/printer driver with whatever it finds. The latter (video) messes up audio for hdmi/displayport in addition of installing bogus drivers.

I'd be tad happier to have apt install/apt update/upgrade instead of windows schedule 'updates'

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