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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

In ~15 years of running Linux on laptops I've yet to have anyone care what I was running looked "weird", including when running e.g. bspwm or other tiling WMs that look totally alien to them.

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Maybe because you are yourself a long time Linux desktop user so that you don't really care what people feel about your environment unless they speak out.

I remember the moment that I saw someone who uses the plain GNOME 3 desktop for the first time when the only Linux I knew was Ubuntu - it was not "weird" but is was enough distinctive to me so that it dragged my all of attention.

If people commented on it, maybe I would care, but what I'm talking about is the total absence of any kind of noticeable reaction from anyone.

I'm genuinely curious if there are places where this actually draws attention. Especially when the linked article talks about "suspicion" not just curiosity.

Perhaps in a non-dev, office worker environment.

Ive had one or two seatmates on the train ask me what I’m doing, but they’ve always been more curious than alarmed.

Same for cafes. Once, the owner struck up a conversation because he himself was a former dev.

There are definitely environments where "weird stuff" on the screen would get attention, but that will apply even if you're running Windows - it just has to look "hacker-like" enough. So I'm not sure disguising the desktop and the file manager will help if you still spend most of your time running shell commands.

If everyone in a workplace spends all their time on corp gmail (white background) and in terminal sessions to some mainframe somewhere (let's be generous and say teal text on black in like 20pt courier), anything that doesn't match either of those appearances will stand out pretty dramatically.

I confess to stopping and asking what it was when a colleague was 3270’d into an AS/400, the font IBM used for that is gorgeous.

That font in modern formats...

https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font

That isn’t it - this one had serifs. Have an upvote anyway :-)

Interesting, as it is definitely the classic 3270/5250 font. Your friend must of specified a very "not 3270" font for their terminal emulator.

The most unixy iconic serif monospaced font I can think of would be Sun's Gallant Demi: https://images.app.goo.gl/Nx2wzRvY71DczMVdA

Or more recently, the Golang monospaced fonts: https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts

Wow that's cute. Also your link breaks the back button, this is post-redirect: https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.furorteutoni...

Direct link (no idea what the google wrapper does; the related images are completely different fonts): http://www.furorteutonicus.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/con...

Post it's from: https://www.furorteutonicus.eu/2014/06/03/solaris-11-2-beta-...

I'd like to know what and where these environments are where NOT using OSX or Windows would look "suspicious".

Any non-tech firm.

That's not the envisioned use case, I guess. From the actual Kali Release Notes, it's specifically about hiding the more iconic parts of Kali for Pen-Testers (logo mostly). So it's a pretty specific use case being considered here.

Heck, opening a terminal seems like the best way to slack off in a corporate environment, as nobody seems to understand what it is and just assumes it's above their pay grade. But you quickly dispel the illusion when you are just as clueless about what is wrong with their Office 365 as they are.

I've definitely had users panic a little bit when they see a windows command prompt on their own machine (when I'm doing tech support or whatever.) I think it's because they see something foreign on a machine that's familiar to them. But I've never had anyone but fellow nerds comment when I run unfamiliar things on my own machine.

Ditto. I didn't realize people were getting picked up enough by the authorities to merit building a Windows clone.

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