this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Does anyone actually run their PC just through terminal? I need pretty colors to live
I did back in college. Mobile computing was just becoming a thing but I was way too hipster (and poor) for a PDA or one of those newfangled "smart phone" devices.
I hacked together a wifi SMS texting gadget following a tutorial on Hack a Day. It ran Debian with Linux kernel 2.6 and was so fun to tinker with.
It had 32 MB of RAM but X used 11 MB of that so you couldn't really do anything in graphical mode anyway. A shell running GNU screen however only took 4 MB so it was much more usable from the terminal.
I eventually figured out a way to pipe images and even (non accelerated, since it didn't have a GPU) video from mplayer to write directly into the framebuffer. It was a real bear to get it translated into landscape mode.
I Am Legend in 144p never looked so good.
Even with the terrible specs, I have never loved a phone so much as I loved that little computer
you gotta be atleast twice my age, that entire string of sentences is absurd to me. No GPU? Original I am legend in 144p; absolute hell, why even live. RAM measured in mb?!?!? Wild
Sounds impressive though atleast
Not unless you're really young. I was just a Linux enthusiast and had a tight budget. I think this is the original article that inspired me: https://hackaday.com/2009/09/25/with-zipit-who-needs-a-netbook/
In college when smartphones were new had to be before 2010 and to be in college you are usually 18 ish atleast so at minimum 11 years older than me and I'm 20. Double was certainly generous but I'm drunk so it is what it is.
Out of curiosity what distro do you use these days?
Haha, well you got me there. I did all that when I was your age, in 2009 :P
These days I don't use my personal computer very often so I want a distro that doesn't break when I update it, so I use Debian Stable with XFCE.
I'm not sure what that makes it in terms of OP's meme. Maybe XFCE is the car
My first computer had 4KB of RAM.
Damn, and I thought my IBM 5150 with its 512KB of RAM was light.
Wild my first (and current) PC has roughly 32gb
I have prertty colours in my terminal
Desktop, no. Back end server, yes.
When I first started out with Linux, I went full ricemode with Arch. For a while I tried running without X, using tmux heavily and browsing with
lynx, only starting a specific X server for games.You can definitely do it, but especially web browsing is not really feasible. There are tons of
curses-like applications likemuttandirssithat work really well, but alas, I ended up going back toi3.Still heavily riced, though, using Vim hotkeys wherever possible. For browsing, qutebrowser is fucking sweet!
GUI is pretty unappealing once you learn CUI. Still need GUI for web browsing, though.
Lynx is kinda a relic. But I do use
browshsometimes if I have to.I assume CUI means console user interface? Didn't know that was a thing
As opposed to CLI, which is specifically command line, yes. The terminal consumes you, relieving you of both the will and necessity that would drive you to use anything else. All of your goals can be accomplished with one weapon: a clicky keyboard.
CUI was me messing up. I meant TUI (text user interface).
The command line interface (CLI) is the original TUI and is always prompt and response. You're prompted for a command, you type it in and then the computer spits out the answer below.
The original CLI were printed on a teletype machine before there were videoterminals. So if your TUI has a real typewriter-kind-of-experience, that's a CLI. So even something like
cowsayis CLI.TUI is a more broadly encompassing term. This includes CLI, but also programs that display text or text like lines all over the screen. The popular library
ncursesis generally used to make these programs. Popular examples would be vim, or emacs, or htop, things like that.A very simple example of a non-CLI TUI program is
less. It lets you pipe output of a CLI command into it so that it can be scrolled without using only the screen buffer.[Edit] "Console" is a pretty unique term. Back when a computer took up an entire room, the console was the table that the computer operator sat at. Some of the earliest WWII era computers, a console might have just had a panel with indicator lights and you primarily interacted with the punchcard interface.
But eventually, the teletype machine or videoterminal sat on the console table. So doing something "at the console" became slang for using CLI and the terms began to be used interchangeably.
And if you want to go deeper into the weeds, there are still console table furniture you can buy for non-computer usages. Basically a console table is a kind of narrow side table you find near a door. Originally most of these tables included front legs made of "consoles" which is an ancient greek corbel (architecture element) that is shaped like a scroll.