When the server is a distro with a custom multi-Unicode-codepoint character as the logo (e.g. Ubuntu) and when the client doesn't have the correct font installed and applied to the terminal software (this is very likely to happen on every OS and term software that is not from that distro), the logo character will be displayed as multiple characters, which will result in one of the following results:
1) When the term software doesn't do soft wrap AND used Unicode-compliant line width count method: the right few characters of the status bar will be out of window bound thus hidden from user
2) When the term software doesn't do soft wrap AND calculates line width by codepoints: there might be a horizontal scrollbar which results in broken CUI and sometimes misoperation (think you can't see the first column of the terminal output)
3) When the term software does soft wrap: every time when status bar text changes it will be moving up by one line. The user cannot correctly see terminal output since every second the caret changes position, and cannot effectively configure byobu to fix the problem. (The default Linux TTY is of this type.)
So, to avoid these problems, I suggest that by default these type of distro icons are not enabled, or at least use ASCII texts by default.
Right.
It would be nice if we could detect this and do the right thing.
I guess we could use a circle, as an approximation of the Ubuntu logo.