Hello everyone.
As the title says, I’m considering to ditch my graphical environment, because I find it very distracting, especially because I can think about playing video games or browsing the web mindlessly when I should be studying. And when I’m studying, those thoughts wander inside my head, and it sucks.
So, moving to a TTY environment, and using terminal programs, is the only way I find to avoid those intrusive thoughts and any other distraction. But I’m afraid that I’ll be very limited somehow, because there aren’t enough programs to fulfill my needs, or because those programs cannot perform as many tasks as their graphical counterparts.
I know some programs that I can use, like Links, Vim/Emacs, mpd, Ranger, and tmux, as well as some rogue-like games, like DCSS, Angband and NetHack. I also heard about framebuffer, but I don’t know how it works.
Did any of you experimented with TTY? How long did you last inside it?
you’re saying you don’t want to use a GUI because you’ll get distracted by video games, and then you list games you can play on a terminal?
Turn-based games are better because you can have them opened without nothing happening in TTY2, for example, and doing serious tasks on TTY1. Doing that while playing Slime Rancher or GTA4 is really difficult, if not impossible.
Besides, main lack of turn-based console games is graphics and a deep history.
A very interesting and crazy proposition, but I think you’re asking the wrong question. There are definitely ways of removing distractions from your environment without resorting to something so drastic.
E.g. have you considered creating a user with restricted access to certain programs (example) and set up add-ons for web browsers that restrict access to certain websites?
I’ve never created other users besides the one that is created during installation. And I don’t know how restriction can be done.
I used browser plug-ins to restrict access to certain sites, but only for main domains, not for subdomains.
I’m a huge proponent of the command line, but you often spend more time learning tools and configuring your environment than getting work done.
I’d instead recommend you start with learning basic system administration for Linux. User management and permissions on https://linuxjourney.com/ or TLCL would be a good place to start. Of course there’s a good chance your desktop environment has ways of configuring users and permissions, too.
Ublock origin has a very powerful URL filtering system, e.g. https://beehaw/c/gaming$document blocks you from accessing the gaming community on beehaw, but doesn’t stop you from accessing https://beehaw.org or other communities on the site.
I’m a huge proponent of the command line, but you often spend more time learning tools and configuring your environment than getting work done.
I agree with this. I remember spending soo much of my time learning and configuring my environment, the time just seemed to fly by.
These days I prefer to just log into xfce and get some work done. I still use my sweet setup of bspwm from time to time tho, will not forget it.
You absolutely can. I used terminals for the first 20 years of my computer use. Just install Debian or other OS without the graphical environment. Like others said use in crtl-alt and one of the function keys can also get you there. The biggest issue is handling images and typesetting. Never tried libsvga type programs but yes they should exist. Back in the day though we just printed a lot more stuff. Also Tex and Latex was a lot more used. ASCII art was also a thing.
So yes pretty much everything can be done in the terminal environment. Some stuff is actually more productive. I still use it for many things.
That depends entirely on what you want to / need to do with your PC.
As a teenager some 15 years ago I did use a TTY only setup on an 800 MHz Pentium for… Months, I guess? Obviously I wasn’t doing anything too immediately productive back then; I was mostly either compiling kernels or playing nethack with the wiki open in (e)links via screen for multiplexing. It was an intensely comfy experience as I recall, just a small handful of processes running at any given time.
I want to study through my documents without feeling the tempation of playing doom, or watching some YouTube videos, or scrolling memes mindlessly on Kbin. Those thoughts lead me to perform those tasks. Having ADHD sucks.
Yeah I suppose that could work. Just get a framebuffer PDF reader going and you’re off to the races. Found this one via Google:
https://github.com/aligrudi/fbpdf
Probably won’t play too well with terminal multiplexing / split windows (tmux, screen), but you could probably have the reader on e.g. TTY2 and a multiplexer on TTY1 for other stuff.
I ran Unix at home all through the 90s with just serial terminals, didn’t switch to X until 2000. But… I wasn’t using the web. There’s a lot of sites now that just don’t work with lynx. (Is links better on that point? I don’t know.)
