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Comment by syntheticnature | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, a new hire should be able to use Google to find https://puttygen.com/download-putty#Download_PuTTY_on_Linux_... in short order

evil grin

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https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

puttygen.com looks super fishy, the disclaimer:

> Puttygen software is not created, nor supported by Puttygen.com. The program has been tested and is believed to be safe. [...] The use of Puttygen through Puttygen.com is done at your own discretion and risk

Edit: or is that the evil grin?

multiple issues right

apt install putty seems... useful? Don't get it.

PuTTY is (or was, in the years before WSL) the go-to SSH client for Windows. If you're a Windows user getting onboarded at a job / uni class which uses Linux machines, installing it is the first thing you'd be told. The laptop in question would obviously have a terminal emulator and SSH client pre-installed, but a Windows user wouldn't think to look for them, and they might not even know that SSH exists outside of PuTTY or that it's a separate concept to the terminal.

Sure, I'm well-aware, and am also aware that someone familiar with a GUI-based way of doing something on one OS may seek the same, or similar, GUI on another (new) OS. It's a familiar anchor in a sea of unknown, a natural thing to do for most users.

I still don't follow the evil grin. Is the apt package some kind of malware or trojan?

It's nothing evil, it's just Putty for Linux, and they say why you might want it. Mostly for people coming from Windows, but supposedly it can also deal with raw sockets that OpenSSH can't.

or just ask an llm

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