20220212-no_x.txt
New OS. Old UI.

I was getting a bit annoyed about my WiFi on my Thinkpad (Linux Mint
18.3, IIRC) semi-randomly disconnecting in the middle of uptime. It
seemed to happen most often when the main battery was around 60-70%. I
don't know. It's a trash driver. Apparently it uses a proprietary
driver? Or has a non-libre one. I'm not sure which one was breaking
every couple of hours, but it was one of those. Also video playback in
framebuffer was awful. In X everything runs fine but in fb0,
everything was a jittery mess. WTF? Maybe it has to do with swap
space, but I doubt it.

I had some other issues, too: the Trackpoint sometimes drifted and
there seemed to be no way to reliably fix it. Bluetooth similarly
d/c'ed quite often to the point of frustration. Why do I get the
feeling this is a combined NIC/BT card and the driver is 100% ass? And
I had wanted to get rid of the default desktop environment for a while
and ONLY have dwm for X.

"It's been a while. Why not install a new distro?" I chose Debian 11.
A) I'm already in the .deb/apt ecosystem and don't see a compelling
reason to switch.  B) It allows you to install without a GUI (score).
C) I'm not about that Arch/CentOS life (see A).

So, as per usual, I fudge something up in the first setup
(accidentally didn't deselect all the DE's/GUI's), so I go through the
setup again (I've been using the TUI bluescreen installer), fix some
things (I did remove my swap partition). I think I ended up having to
do it a 3rd time, or I maybe I just had to go back and format the root
partition. Whatever. I don't have a WiFi driver, but I do have an
internet connection thanks to Ethernet-over-Power. Booyah!

Everything is working great, although I feel very weird logging into
root (didn't even have sudo from the netinst image) and not having a
single media player. But I've been using TTY's for so long I don't
really feel all that threatened or hopeless (framebuffer playback is
solid now). I'm actually pretty psyched. Lynx, Links2 (TUI and GUI),
mplayer, vifm, etc. The only TUI program I don't have is newsbeuter,
which isn't in the repos for this one. I'm not sure if it was in the
repos for Mint 18, either. 

Tonight I'm going to try to find WiFi drivers (probably in some weird
lib* package) and newsbeuter. Thanks to beautiful projects like
libreddit (more want-to-have features than gopherddit, which I still
use) and Invidious, I can consume most of my media without X. I may
not even install it, although the one biggest hurdle would be doing
online activities that require Javascript. Speaking of, I have toyed
around a bit with edbrowse, but I may be missing something with the JS
support (and I realize it's not complete, but I'm doing pretty basic
stuff). I turned it on but my custom webpage didn't seem to respond.
Maybe I have to reload with resubmitting form data or something. I
also want to reload/paste back some config files.

Whatever. This is freaking cool.