Initially about 15 years ago because the laptop I bought did not have kernel support for the mobile gpu so I could not run a graphical desktop for a while, so I added kernel support for framebuffer on my GPU myself which was only a 7 line change (upstreamed to kernel) and then realized the framebuffer plus tmux and I was kind of set apart from youtube, so I wrote a one liner to pull raw video content from youtube and stream to the framebuffer with mplayer.

Overall I found there was almost nothing to do my job that actually required a GUI so did not bother fixing it.

The only software I tend to use today is a terminal and a browser, and graphical browsers are a hellscape of cookie approval prompts and ads and tracking. Thankfully today a local LLM can go to the web and fetch whatever content for me, so I am once again phasing out my use of web browsers.

What I wanted (and to an extent still do) is extreme simplicity and OS level minimalism. I was hoping to understand everything up to the browser, really. My interest in this has been renewed since AI: I have a sense that extreme simplicity may be the only viable approach for security in FLOSS if AI tilts the scales in favour of throwing cash (and therefore tokens) at problems.

It's not for me, but I can see the appeal - minimalism, distraction elimination, geek cred, and the sort of flow state one gets from working in a low latency, high muscle memory environment.

For me it's about having a distraction-free environment. I dislike having useless information cluttering my screen real-estate.

Even now that I moved away from text-only, I typically work only with fullscreen windows. All I want to see is what I am focusing on at the moment.