Windowing in a Text Enviroment


Brodie Robertson - This Graphical Desktop Environment Is TEXT BASED??

Brodie Robertson - Your Mouse Works On The Linux TTY!?!?


I don't have a full blown wall of text on this one. I think in concept it's neat, especially to make use of lower powered devices, but I also think it's somewhat flawed. That is simply an opinion I hold, and I do not mean that as some sort of attack against anyone personally or their workflow. If this works? It works. I personally think it's cool, especially since it can be used alongside terminal multiplexers, but I also think it is ultimately a 'because I can' project.


Mind you I think 'Because I can' is a perfectly valid reason, but I think this has no real audiance that isn't already served by multiplexing. Then again I'm someone that has been around those with low to no useable vision most of my life and have vision problems of my own. So I know how ... finnicky screen readers can be. Going with something that is keyboard focused and whole screen per application cuts down on the things your reader of choice has to sort through.


So what's the other use case?


Near as I can think of, the only real use case is if someone wants to squeeze as much out of a single board device that isn't powerful enough to support an actual desktop. This isn't an entirely bad idea, as I have a pi zero floating around with a mini hdmi to dvi port cable along with a .img file of a raspbian lite install with afew other programs and settings done (mostly so it will auto-mount a thumb drive of mine automatically, have an SFTP server, and is its own access point. Long story short; internet outages and growing up pre-internet has had me not take 'always on' for granted, so making a backup for my devices to talk to eachother is something i want on hand. My setup for the thing is currently so it can be headless, but it is appealing to have something that can just plug into a tv and go, or at least it would've been about a decade ago before even cheap phones can mirror their screens to a second display.


Yet the idea of having a pi zero with a pogo pin thing that gives it more USB ports to act as a pack of gum sized computer that doens't have all the bells and whistles and has that bare basic 'I made this my own' enviroment really is appealing to me.


yet I don't really want to have a fake-desktop there. I would prefer to just alt tab between programs that are running. Maybe someone else wants this. Maybe I'm just overthinking cool neat dumb 'because I can' programmer thing.


I just thought it was neat.


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