Between the anti-woke conspiracism and the outright racism, transphobia and general bigotry, I don't know how anyone can use those forums for anything. Genuinely the most toxic and hate-filled forums I've ever used in my 30-odd years of internetting.

That is true, but it also shows that this issue has gone on for over a decade and not been solved.

That’s true, but it could still be more specific.

For example there’s a comment about symlinks on exFAT. Steam could say “failed to create symbolic link” instead of “disk write error” in that case.

There typically are a few different error conditions for normal writes too that Steam could pass on. E.g. on Linux there are separate errors for out of quota, files becoming too large for the fs they’re on, the fs being out of space, and low-level I/O errors.

Yes OS errors can be vague, but no, you’re not going to just get “disk write error” for such disparate errors.

Do a search for “errno”, and specifically the POSIX error section. There are separate errors for “permission denied”, “device unavailable”, “bad file descriptor”, etc. Windows API calls have a whole host of their own error codes, plus functions to examine what’s going wrong specifically.

This is most likely caused by a higher layer in the code catching errors when it doesn’t know what to do with them, and then just showing a generic message.

I used to have it on Windows on certain patches but never on CachyOS. Often with blue screens. I say certain patches because it would keep happening a lot until I updated Windows. One time the system wouldn‘t recognize my disc drive until I unplugged and replugged it. That stuck with me.

Hold on let me check....computer says no.

So all of that is probably technically true.

If Steam can’t write to the disk for any reason, all it can say is there is a disk write error.

But it's [current year]. I'm sure we as mankind and GabeN in particular could figure something out to make meaningful error messages from the OS through steam, to the user a reality.

Everything my computer does or any other machine, should align with me so I can use it. That's the point. I want human readable error messages. I want buttons that are big enough for me to touch and I want an instruction manual in a language I can read. Or a good picture based one.

For example. It could be that there is not enough disk space. It could be a permission issue and it could be some hardware failure. Either of those would help me.

I dont think I've ever seen a steam error, neither on all my time on linux, nor on windows before it.

Certainly wasnt problem free, but typically never came with errors.

So what the issue with my car?
Well it doesn't start up

Not bashing on Steam, to be clear, but this error will not help fix the issue, user actually needs to investigate one of the many reasons this could be.

A meaningful error may be: write failed because files are locked by process xy.

Because there's no error code attached or any details about what specific error it was, what file it happened on, what mount it happened on, etc...

It’s pretty straightforward.

logs

Just like every program.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

If it has over two thousand pages of problem reports, users asking for help, it is a legitimate problem and the logs are not a sufficient help to those users.

Every error steam has given me was easily figured out in the logs.

Wouldn't it be better if the error message itself helped you figure it out, so that you don't have to look into logs? People seriously underestimate useful information in a good error message. Stuff like "Windows encountered an unexpected error" are just not useful.

Yes? The error should at least show basic info. Requiring checking the logs when the error message could just show some info is silly and clearly doesn't work well given how many people are asking for help with it.