• poweruser@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      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

      • sharkfucker420@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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

    • s_s@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      GUI is pretty unappealing once you learn CUI. Still need GUI for web browsing, though.

        • spikespaz@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • Ricaz@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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!