Linux is the product story.

Your interview lives in a browser tab.

Coding interviews happen in the browser — a LeetCode tab, a CoderPad, a company portal. That tab is a sandbox: it can see its own DOM, not your operating system. It doesn’t know what other apps you have open, and it can’t reliably peek at a native desktop overlay.

That sandbox is why “invisible floating overlay inside the desktop” is a category claim you’ll hear elsewhere. On macOS and Windows the overlay can sometimes hide inside the compositor. On Linux that trick is brittle or missing — which is the gap Aspera was built for.

Optional read: The product loop: hide → capture → analyze → deliver is the ops version of this argument.

Full-screen share sees the desktop.

Interviews don’t share “just the tab.” Most platforms ask for share your entire screen or share a window + ask for full-screen anyway. When you click share, the other side gets your desktop — wallpaper, dock, browser, editor, terminal, and any window you pop open afterward.

That’s not a Linux quirk; it’s how full-screen share is supposed to work. Anything visible on the shared desktop is visible to the interviewer.

Why Linux is different.

Paid overlays in this category rarely ship a Linux desktop binary at all. The few that claim “invisible in screenshare” usually mean an OS-level overlay trick on macOS/Windows. On Linux, where share captures the desktop reliably, that trick collapses — your app window is in the share if it’s visible.

So the viable move on Linux isn’t to make a window “invisible inside the share.” It’s simpler and sturdier: don’t put the window in the share at all. Hide the whole app. Do the work off the shared surface.

Aspera’s model: hide + hotkey + off-device.

No floating UI on the shared screen. No answers sitting in the desktop you’re sharing.

1. Hide the app — Stealth mode keeps Aspera out of view. Share your screen; the interviewer sees browser + editor, not the assistant. Hotkeys & stealth.
2. Hotkey capture — Global shortcut grabs any screen region. OCR pulls code and prompt text without clicking a visible button. Default Ctrl+Shift+J is configurable.
3. Answers off the shared screen — Results go to private chat, email, or Telegram, or stay in a hidden window you check on your own. The shared desktop never needs to show the solution. Off-device answers.

Under the hood it’s Gemini, ChatGPT, or Claude with your own encrypted keys — stored locally in the OS keychain, not sent to Aspera servers.

A native app, outside the browser.

Aspera is a desktop app, not a browser extension or an overlay snippet injected into the interview tab. That matters because the tab can’t police what a native app does — and the screenshare’s job is to show the desktop, not to audit it. Aspera leans on that separation: it lives outside the sandbox and stays off the surface you share.

Bottom line.

On Linux, full-screen share shows desktop apps. So the Linux-native interview overlay isn’t a fancier floating window — it’s hide, capture off a hotkey, and deliver off-device. Three pillars, one equation.