Is it possible to survive using only TTY capabilities? Here's my brief story about how I struggled with TTY, wanting to get it to work properly.
Background
Recently, the graphics card on my old laptop failed. It failed so badly that I couldn't even launch an installer for any OS. Windows crashed with errors during the installation of basic drivers. Installing Linux wouldn't start at all, even when I specified nouveau.modeset=0 in the boot configuration.
I didn't want to buy a new graphics card for a laptop that has served its time. However, as a true Linux user, I began to consider: "Why not turn this laptop into a terminal computer, just like in the '80s?". Thus, the idea was born not to install xserver on Linux but to try to survive on TTY (the bare console).
The First Difficulties
I installed it on my PC. . I love this distribution because you can configure it however you like (and the installation was done from the console, which was convenient for me). Following the manual, I installed the system as always. Now I wanted to see what the console could do. I suspected that without xserver I had cut myself off from many possibilities. I wanted to see if the bare console could play videos or show a photo (as w3m does in the console), but all attempts were in vain. Then I started trying browsers and encountered the clipboard issue: it's useless without a GUI. I can't select anything; the clipboard is empty. There is an internal buffer (like in Vim), but it's internal. I remember that in Vim's configs you can specify the use of an external buffer, but then I ask myself: why? I felt like I was in a cage. I couldn't watch videos because xserver was needed, alsa-mixer also wouldn't work without it, hence there was no sound, and browsers were useless—every single one: (which didn't load images), (which was convenient but also absolutely useless), (which processed all images and passed them to the terminal as ASCII art, but it wasn't possible to even click links). It was getting to evening, and I had a "stub" in my hands, with which I could only compile code. The most I could do was look for documentation on how2 and surf using ddgr.
So is there a way out?
This is where I start to wonder if I took the wrong turn. It's easier to just buy a graphics card than to deal with a half-baked solution. Not that I would call Linux with just TTY a completely unnecessary system—no, it might work for server administrators, but my initial goal was to turn TTY into a "delight," and instead, I ended up with a Frankenstein's monster that convulsed whenever it came to GUI operations. I wanted more, so I ultimately abandoned the idea of playing video and audio materials and started thinking about how to create an SSH server to have some fun when I'm away from home.
What did I actually want?
- Working with code: Vim, NeoVim, linters, debuggers, interpreters, compilers, and all that jazz.
- The ability to surf the internet peacefully.
- Software for the institute (at least some programs that can render a document in the web with .md markup).
- Convenience.
Survival.
I installed and set up Vim, Nvim, and all the other joys of a lazy programmer quite quickly. However, surfing the internet posed some challenges (who would have thought?), since I still couldn't copy links. Then I thought that surfing the internet from the console was at least imprudent, and I began looking for alternatives. It took a while to find console RSS feed readers, but I eventually found a couple and happily started using them to enjoy the flow of information.
Now, for document handling software. Here I had to put in some effort to write a script so that my .md file could render without a graphics card (irony). For this, I used a service to view and distribute .md files, and then with another service for processing web pages, I created documents in .pdf. Problem solved.
Comfort also had its issues. The terminal doesn't support all colors properly, resulting in something like . The question of panels (or rather their lack) was quickly solved using tmux. I chose Ranger + fzf and ripgrep for quick file searching. I went with elinks as my browser (since you can navigate links with numbers). There were a few other moments, but they all got resolved quickly with a certain list of utilities.
Result
It wasn't worth the time spent. Let me warn you right away, if you want to switch to console mode for a while, be prepared to struggle. However, in the end, I had a completely functional system with a file manager, panels, a browser, editors, and compilers. Overall, not bad, but after a week, I just couldn't take it anymore and bought a new PC. That's all I have. Share your experiences; I would be interested to know what you did when you found yourself in console-only mode for a while.
Source: habr.com
