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Comment by lrvick | Hacker News Reader

You can also use mplayer with "-fp" to play video on the frambuffer as well.

I have gone weeks at a time without using a graphical desktop at all thanks to these tools.

yep! and ffplay will detect your situation and run on the framebuffer if that seems appropriate. I'm sure there's arguments to explicitly tell it to do that, but I've never used them :)

This is a great tip, do you have others? I've tried to ditch graphical desktop envs and failed pretty miserably on media consumption and browsing before.

I messed with this a bit and found fbdev forces even gpu accelerated video decode or rendered apps (e.g. even terminal text these days) to go through the CPU/RAM copy path whereas a lightweight graphical setup (like a minimal sway with a full screen terminal window open) is zero copy. Minor thing, but I'll gladly trade a little RAM for some battery life + simplicity if I ever do need to open something actually graphical on the machine.

If you wanted a minimal terminal with graphical support then you should probably just run a minimal Wayland session with cage + terminal emulator

fbdev is not it, going through the DRM subsystem is much better

I'm curious, what's the motivation for not having a graphical environment at all?

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.

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.

> The only software I tend to use today is a terminal and a browser

i'm exactly in the same situation. for this reason i run on dwm and no DE. but i'd like to phase out some of my web browsing, for the same reasons you mentioned. could you please elaborate on your local LLM setup and how you use it to substitute web browsing?

"Can you setup a daily job to monitor and download youtube videos from any channels listed in subscriptions.txt"

"Can you setup a daily job to search for any articles on supply chain attacks, format them as normalized markdown files and store them under Research/supply-chain ?"

"Can you go find me a good price on some used DDR5 ram from a reputable seller?"

Etc etc.

Use agents to bring the internet to you.

Can do basically anything with a Strix Halo board at home.

interesting. i can definitely think of similar use cases. but can all of this be accomplished with local LLMs? do you run it on expensive hardware? are there specific models, agent frameworks and other tooling you recommend?

btw as another strategy to avoid web browsing i've been relying a lot on content being delivered as email newsletters. seems like it would also be easy to process that using LLMs

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.

It's not an answer to your question per se but I find various keyboard driven tiling WMs to be sufficiently minimal while still allowing GPU accelerated stuff to "just work".

Don't use mplayer for this. Use mpv --vo=gpu --gpu-context=drm

This gives you hardware acceleration without a desktop environment.

Do you browse with framebuffer links too? :)

These days I prefer to ask an LLM to just go fetch content for me as much as possible.

How often do they run into anti bot protections?

Vision language models are quite good at solving captchas now :)

-links +lynx

`links` is a text mode browser which is more capable than `lynx` and which has graphics support through the framebuffer.

and elinks is better than both of them :))

and w3m if you want support for images

And chawan is better than all of them, even has basic support for CSS and Javascript.

I have gone 18 years for me without using a graphical desktop

Are you blind or committed?

Or blindly committed

The "graphical desktop" is a stupid metaphor for an interface

Not to be confused the "desktop computer" which refers a form factor that rests on top of a desk

Ah yes, back in 2004/2005 I got an old laptop (Pentium 200 or something like that) for free that wasn't fast enough to reliably read videos with X11, but it worked fine as a movie watching device for my children using mplayer in FB mode :)

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