I used to work on that stuff (mostly focused on WIM file format). There's probably a file somewhere called setupact.log that gives you tons of detail on what goes wrong. They don't surface a lot of detailed errors to UI, but the logging is usually precise about what fails and why.

The problem I have with that is that you need to know which log file to look into when an obscure error shows up. If you already know it, you can solve an issue easily, but if you don't, and the error doesn't tell you the details or where to find them, you'll find yourself banging your head against the wall for days.

Instead of the (fairly useless) "Make sure the installation sources are valid and restart the installation", the error could have said "More information can be found in X:\...\setupact.log" which would have been more useful to a person technical enough to read it, and equally useless for the few non-technical users who will ever encounter this error.

This applies to many errors that just tell you what failed with generic steps that might help instead of actual useful information.

Correct, I won't defend all of that, some of these messages were irritatingly vague, and it doesn't tell you how to find the log.

Though in fairness, I believe though the most common cause for an error in that path would be a problem with the installation media, and probably more likely to be checksum errors on an optical drive, or perhaps corruption on the machine capturing the WIM file, or even a bad drive on the target machine -- all of these are much more likely that than someone stuffing a Linux image onto installation media.. So I could see a message geared towards that.

When I was responsible for the WIM code, I got pinged with a lot of noise from people all over Microsoft installing Windows onto bad disks. They usually thought they hit setup bugs.

Yep, the setupact.log is how I eventually figured out that it's looking for the WindowsPE SKU, not Core (despite me picking Core in GImageX when offered). They mention the setupact.log somewhere on one of the dozens of pages of Windows deployment, I pretty much found out about its existence by clicking around randomly and reading articles that looked relevant.