They are just old school. When you learn coding before GUIs were mainstream, you don't care that much about exciting UIs.

Heck, Kernighan was one of the original developers of Unix. In 2015 he was already coding for more than 40-50 years, more time than most from Hacker News are alive. The only constant from that time is the terminal, so no wonder most people in the post gravitate towards that

The more 'h4ck3r' screenshot you have with useless toys at /r/unixporn in Reddit, the less you actually know about computers.

Most i3 setups there are for showoff; cwm has better defaults and conmuting between tags it's far more manageable than fighting with tiles where often the window resolutions are either useless or scramble your content.

Also most fluxbox or *box users will have far better setups than i3 ones because they use their actual setups to do actual stuff instead of posting screenshots.

Coincidence? No, these are people for whom the computer is a tool. My smartest and most productive colleague run stock KDE and a more or less unconfigured Vim. He truly does not give a shit.

So you're telling me my juiced-up i3 with the anime girl and equalizer in the background doesn't make me the hacker wizard I thought I was?

Stock ubuntu LTS is the biggest flex.

Maybe what we need is a screenshot of their brain thinking

Boring is good.

[dead]