hidden error messages

[Mike Cornelison]

I just had yet another unpleasant experience trying to play a multimedia 
file (quick time .mov file). I tried several media players and I 
witnessed crashes, cryptic messages and often nothing at all unless I 
ran the app from a terminal in order to see messages to stdout and 
stderr. I got the messages, but they were no help.

I gave up and booted windows to view the file.

The point of this message is the crappy state of user messages and 
diagnostics, not particularly in Ubuntu, but Linux in general. Perhaps 
Gnome apps are the greatest offenders here (weak opinion).

When a GUI application outputs error messages to stdout or stderr, it is 
like writing them into a black hole. This stupid practice should stop. 
Messages to stdout or stderr should pop-up in a text window. This should 
be a standard part of Gnome/GTK or any other desktop GUI. stdout and 
stderr should be piped to another process to display. Better yet, 
printf() should not be used at all in such apps, since popping up a 
message window is so easy. In the case where a GUI front-end is driving 
a command-line back-end, output can still be piped back and displayed, 
although obviously there is more work to filter and recognize the error 
messages that the user needs to see.

Can't this sorry situation be improved?