💾 Archived View for gemini.ctrl-c.club › ~stack › gemlog › 2022-02-01.offgui.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 03:12:01. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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As I've written before, being connected to the internet is much of an issue for me. Getting off the GUI seems like a much worthier - and attainable - goal.
I've never done social media - I instantly recognized it for what it was - a chance to reconnect with people I had no desire for reconnecting with while someone snoops on me. If I wanted to keep in touch with someone, I would have done it by the time Facebook algorithms were concocted. I did sign up on Facebook in order to untag my pictures (the sheeple just kept associating names with pictures for free, to the joy of three-letter organizations), until I realized a couple of weeks later that it was completely pointless, and never went on again.
I use my phone exclusively as a telephone (to be honest, once a week while sitting in the car for alternate-street parking, I browse Gemini on my phone).
I spend most of my time in Gemini as of late, but I still need to get on the bigweb quite often.
I often look up words in dictionaries for SpellBinding. I write code, and quite often need to look up some algorithm or library. I do a bit of research into obscure datastructures and computer languages. And sometimes I just like to read a bit of hackernews.
The browser has become an untenable beast, consuming ridiculous resources. My computer is a modest by today's standards notebook with a 2-core i7-6500U CPU at 2.5GHz. The browsers chew it to bits.
I usually wind up with two browsers open - a Waterfox with blockers of all sorts for general use and -- ironically -- an entirely unprotected Opera browser for banking and other transactions (because banks have so much embedded crap that my private browser fails). Between the two (each with dozens of tabs and windows across workspaces), most of my resources are eaten up.
Today I woke up to my computer barely responsive in the SSH window. I thought it was the remote site, but no, it was my machine! I couldn't even switch windows to kill the browsers - I had to go into a console to reboot. This happens every so often.
To be fair, it's not just the browser. PCManFM file manager sometimes eats half the CPU, and the fans start running fast. Other applications can be bad as well.
Back in the day, I thought GUIs were stupid. Well, original Windows was, and the Mac seemed like a way to fleece people with too much money. I embraced GUIs later, but never really liked them. I got tired of buying a new Mac every couple of years, and all those MSDN CDs and DVDs (not to mention all the money I to make Bill and Steve rich). It was a relief to go Linux-only at the turn of the century, but even Linux was GUI'ed up by then.
I've thought about it for a while. I don't think I am ready to completely give up X - there are so many things I like about it (but that's another story). I definitely need subpixel rendering for my terminals. I need GUI apps sometimes - this is my only machine right now.
Window manager is not too much of an issue, although I would probably enjoy something minimal, maybe even the suckless one (that one seems too minimal, actually). StumpWM is a likely candidate for me as I love Common Lisp... But I am pretty used to Xubuntu's XFCE, and it does not get in my way much.
My goal is to minimize, not complicate my life with new software, unless it really helps.
Looking at merriam-webster.com with lynx is a bit hard, but I suppose I can deal with it to avoid the browser. I need to figure out the difference between lynx, links, links2, etc.
I love LaGrange for Gemini, and will probably continue using it. I've had no resource-related issues with it yet. I do want to find a terminal-based client that is not written in a google/mozilla language, just because I have some issues with such things. I also hate Python, largely for its library system that sucks in god-knows-what, and because I care about languages. That leaves what - gmni? fafi? elpher?
As for the rest of what I do - I already do it on the command-line. I generally use emacs, which I find too heavy. I really need to switch to vim.
I am not quite ready to jail myself with a command-line environment. But I will certainly try to do less with the GUI.
I will report my progress or failure as I go.