My work PC does this every time I turn it on. After 2 years it still gives me that jolt of "oh shit".

My elderly parents both have laptops with Windows 11 (don't @ me, they can't possibly learn a new OS at this point). Every once in a while they briefly throw up like 100 cmd windows. I have no clue what they are.

The amount of legitimate software that's just batch scripts is pretty amusing. I always make sure to read and understand what it's doing in that case, though

And it indeed broke stuff

It could have also been a proper .SCR (screensaver) file.

Because, fun fact: screensaver files on Windows are just renamed exes.

I mean you can just execute anything from the primary Linux interface - the commandline. It seems equivalent.

Back circa 2000 I was a Visual Basic developer. In my corporate apps I would always put in easter eggs that would randomly throw up message boxes saying stuff like "No matter where you go, there you are." This always pissed off the c-suite types and they would demand that the source be found and eliminated, but none of the other developers ever found it. All I did was convert the message string to a series of CHR(n) commands, and for the MsgBox command I just put like a thousand spaces in front of it in a small, rarely-used file. A search for the text of the message would return nothing, and a manual inspection of the file wouldn't reveal anything unless you happened to notice the horizontal scroll bar this produced at the bottom. One of the applications I wrote is still in use at this company (and still occasionally throwing up these easter eggs) and it was basically a front end wrapping a mainframe program dating to the 1970s, which means that thing is still running.

...I've actually never heard of that trick.

One take is that 'normal' users get 'scared' by extensions and do strange things like break their file by renaming the extension away or think they can literally convert a file between types by changing the extension.

And so they hide it away.

But it's bad logic because breaking things by trying to do weird stuff is how any of us who are technically literate became that way in the first place; by fucking around and finding out.

Mac (I think), iOS, and Android do.

Because for the significant majority of users it doesn't matter.

Because they want to push power users away with hundreds of tiny cuts

Does it? I always see them.

Soulseek is still around

Limewire, ares, bearshare, kazaa, imesh...