Из-за установления переменной окружения LESS в /etc/profile программы, которые используют less(1), такие как git и hg, запускают less(1) неправильно, что приводит к эскейп мусору на экране.
Патрик таки читает linuxquestions.org
Для Ъ https://slackware.uk/slackware/slackware64-current/ChangeLog.txt
Mon Aug 30 18:22:08 UTC 2021
a/etc-15.0-x86_64-15.txz:  Rebuilt.
  /etc/profile: Don't define a $LESS variable, but provide a commented-out
  example of "-M -R". As far as I can tell, setting $LESS to -M is something
  that we picked up from SLS's /etc/profile at the very beginning and then
  kept it because it wasn't causing any problems. Personally, I'll be
  uncommenting this because it's nice to get the extra output from less
  provided by -M concerning your place in the file, but we'll leave it up
  to the end user how to handle this.
  Thanks to krown, marav, LockyWolf, and drgibbon.




