XFCE taking the picture
XFCE taking the picture
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
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
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 like mutt and irssi that work really well, but alas, I ended up going back to i3.
Still heavily riced, though, using Vim hotkeys wherever possible. For browsing, qutebrowser is fucking sweet!
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 cowsay is 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 ncurses is generally used to make these programs. Popular examples would be vim, or emacs, or htop, things like that.
A very simple example of a TUI program is less. It lets you pipe output of a TUI command into it so that it can be scrolled without using only the screen buffer.