Do I need a desktop? -Debian

[Gat Pelsinger]

My eyes can't handle this much GUI on Linux (Debian). I expected something different. A pitch black world, with you and that blinking cursor floating in space. I already nuked my desktop, is it a good idea? The resolution of the default tty is small, can I increase it? The font is ugly, can I change that too? I might be understanding the login tty completely different. I get that it is not a terminal emulator, but is it workable or not? But hey, at least I get back a lot of memory.

[goatedpenguin]

You sound really inexperienced with Linux judging from your other posts. You can get a "big black screen with a floating cursor" by booting with runlevel 3. And yes you can change your font and increase it by using the setfont command. And what do you mean by "I nuked my desktop"? Note runlevels can vary for different distos but for debian runlevel 2-5 is for multi user modes etc. You can change the runlevel through systemd or by editing the /etc/somefilenameiforgot.conf or you can edit it via grub.

[Eigenvektor]

You can certainly install Debian in console only mode. This is how I run it on my servers. There is no reason for a UI to exist on a server you only interact with through SSH (and it has the benefit of reducing the attack surface -> less software, less potential exploits). Of course on a machine you sit in front of to e.g. browse the web, a DE is definitely a plus (though not strictly required, depending on your use case)

[wasab]

I have a desktop environment and xorg installed on my server machine just in case I need to run gui app on it for some reason but they are disabled by default and operating system only boots to a command line interface. Most of the time I just ssh in so I don't even have it connected to a monitor. 

 

To boot up a gui, I just run startx on my cli and that will start the xorg and bring up a DE(I usually install xfce for servers) Easy peasy

[Gat Pelsinger]

@goatedpenguin

 

hmm, I see. Well, the setfont command doesn't work. It says that the default font wasn't found.

[goatedpenguin]

can you send a screenshot and you may have to download your desired font if the system does not have it.

[dcgreen2k]

If this is meant to go on your personal machine, I highly recommend keeping the desktop environment. It makes everyday use much easier.

 

That being said, if you'd like to have Debian boot to a terminal by default, run the command:

systemctl set-default multi-user.target

 

To have it boot to the GUI, run this:

systemctl set-default graphical.target

 

Alternatively, if you want to switch to a terminal from your desktop, use Ctrl+Alt+F* https://wiki.debian.org/Console. On my system, Ctrl+Alt+F3 brings me to a terminal and Ctrl+Alt+F2 brings me back to the graphical environment.

 

If you'd like to keep the GUI but have it use less resources, you can install a lightweight desktop environment. Xfce and Lxde seem to be popular for this.

[Kilrah]

Well the default in major distros is to... kinda have a usable desktop environment for the average user.

 

There are window managers like https://awesomewm.org/ that have non-overlapping "tiles" and are closer to the 1337 you're probably looking for...

 

Or things like https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

 

Plenty of things around, just need to search for them and it's likely you'll find something you like.

[Gat Pelsinger]

@dcgreen2k

 

Yeah but how do I customize that terminal? I guess the first question I should ask is what am I looking for? What do those pro Linux programmers use? The default text terminal or the GUI based terminal emulator?

[dcgreen2k]

4 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

@dcgreen2k

 

Yeah but how do I customize that terminal? I guess the first question I should ask is what am I looking for? What do those pro Linux programmers use? The default text terminal or the GUI based terminal emulator?

I don't think you can customize the default terminal, but you can customize the GUI ones. Everybody uses GUI based terminal emulators because of how much more convenient they are - the functionality is largely the same between the two since they're just bash terminals.

[Gat Pelsinger]

@dcgreen2k

 

Hmm, I see. But I've seen some people with such a setup that looks like a middle ground between console and GUI. For example this guy - https://www.youtube.com/@TsodingDaily/. When he has a terminal, it is just a terminal. And I cannot see anything related to GUI. But he still manages to run a web browser. And stuff like his taskbar is very customized.

[dcgreen2k]

30 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

@dcgreen2k

 

Hmm, I see. But I've seen some people with such a setup that looks like a middle ground between console and GUI. For example this guy - https://www.youtube.com/@TsodingDaily/. When he has a terminal, it is just a terminal. And I cannot see anything related to GUI. But he still manages to run a web browser. And stuff like his taskbar is very customized.

I found this in one of his videos, is this what you're talking about?

 

It looks like he's just using a window manager to get the super clean look. At the top of the screen, you can see he has GitHub open in a web browser and GNU Emacs as his text editor. A lot of the terminal-based work he does seems to be done through Emacs plugins, although I'm not super familiar with it.

[goatedpenguin]

1 hour ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

@dcgreen2k

 

Yeah but how do I customize that terminal? I guess the first question I should ask is what am I looking for? What do those pro Linux programmers use? The default text terminal or the GUI based terminal emulator?

Okay bro first of all what your going for is to not disable the gui but to use a terminal, the “pros” use many types of terminals like alacritty etc. You need to find what works for you and not others thats the whole point of using linux compared to windows. I for one use the default xfce terminal with a bit of shell mods, keybinds appearance etc.(i use manjaro theming on vannila arch). And before you start customizing the terminal you need to learn the linux command line, the fs etc and not be a script kitty otherwise you may break your system have unwanted problems and other bad stuff.

[wasab]

1 hour ago, dcgreen2k said:

I found this in one of his videos, is this what you're talking about?

 

It looks like he's just using a window manager to get the super clean look. At the top of the screen, you can see he has GitHub open in a web browser and GNU Emacs as his text editor. A lot of the terminal-based work he does seems to be done through Emacs plugins, although I'm not super familiar with it.

either that or he might just be screen capturing a particular area of the screen so we dont see the rest of his desktop. 

Most developers code in macos professionally. i have yet to see one who runs linux on his work computer even if the software being developed is meant to host on Linux machines. This means a minimal ui with a none stacking windowing manager is pretty much not a thing for most people, even among developers.

[dcgreen2k]

17 minutes ago, wasab said:

Most developers code in macos professionally. i have yet to see one who runs linux on his work computer even if the software being developed is meant to host on Linux machines. 

That's pretty surprising to me. The majority of the people on my research team use Linux for work, with only a couple on Windows. We don't have any MacOS users.

 

17 minutes ago, wasab said:

This means a minimal ui with a none stacking windowing manager is pretty much not a thing for most people, even among developers.

I totally agree with that. This kind of minimal GUI is definitely uncommon - I only know one person who does this kind of thing and he lives inside NixOS and Emacs. 

[wasab]

13 minutes ago, dcgreen2k said:

That's pretty surprising to me. The majority of the people on my research team use Linux for work, with only a couple on Windows. We don't have any MacOS users.

I only know that companies like google, microsoft, apple, ect do not hand out linux computers to their onboarding employees. My company hands everyone a MacBook pro, developer or not, although we engineers do get a special 64 gig ram version because of reasons. 

 

oh, i cant just wipe out the macos and boot into windows or linux btw. you dont do this to company laptops. 

[dcgreen2k]

2 minutes ago, wasab said:

I only know that companies like google, microsoft, apple, ect do not hand out linux computers to their onboarding employees. My company hands everyone a MacBook pro, developer or not, although we engineers do get a special 64 gig ram version because of reasons. 

I see, that makes sense. 

[goatedpenguin]

4 hours ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

@dcgreen2k

 

Hmm, I see. But I've seen some people with such a setup that looks like a middle ground between console and GUI. For example this guy - https://www.youtube.com/@TsodingDaily/. When he has a terminal, it is just a terminal. And I cannot see anything related to GUI. But he still manages to run a web browser. And stuff like his taskbar is very customized.

He is using a tiling window manager known as i3 with debian linux, it has a steep learning curve and a new user will find it rather boring but trying and learning would cause no harm.

[Sauron]

12 hours ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

I already nuked my desktop, is it a good idea?

No

12 hours ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

The resolution of the default tty is small, can I increase it?

Yes, using kernel mode settings. Or you could just open a full screen terminal on your gui.

8 hours ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

Hmm, I see. But I've seen some people with such a setup that looks like a middle ground between console and GUI. For example this guy - https://www.youtube.com/@TsodingDaily/. When he has a terminal, it is just a terminal. And I cannot see anything related to GUI. But he still manages to run a web browser. And stuff like his taskbar is very customized.

That's still a graphical UI, just a more barebones one than the average desktop environment. It looks like DWM at a glance but it could also just be i3 or another tiling window manager, you can achieve more or less the same things with either. I've used i3 extensively, it has many advantages if you know what you're doing but I would not recommend it to a beginner. If you try i3 I can already see the dozens of posts here about "how do I get a desktop background in i3" and "how can I get audio in i3"... maybe stick to something ready-to-use if you don't know what you're doing

[Gat Pelsinger]

@dcgreen2k @goatedpenguin @Sauron

 

Ok so I will keep my desktop I guess. But not GNOME. It is very heavy and too fancy. One thing I noticed when installing Debian is that there was a desktop environment called "Debian desktop environment" or something like that, but GNOME was also installed on it. How does that desktop look like? I couldn't find it.

 

Anyways, I need a lighter one. I heard XFCE is a good one. But are there better and lighter ones? I don't mind going old, its only a GUI anyways.

 

 

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

Ok so I will keep my desktop I guess. But not GNOME. It is very heavy and too fancy. One thing I noticed when installing Debian is that there was a desktop environment called "Debian desktop environment" or something like that, but GNOME was also installed on it. How does that desktop look like? I couldn't find it.

"debian desktop environment" is just gnome afaik

[Gat Pelsinger]

6 minutes ago, Sauron said:

"debian desktop environment" is just gnome afaik

No when installing, there is the debian desktop environment, and then gnome also selected.

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

No when installing, there is the debian desktop environment, and then gnome also selected.

https://wiki.debian.org/DesktopEnvironment#Installation_of_a_desktop_environment

[wasab]

12 hours ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

No when installing, there is the debian desktop environment, and then gnome also selected.

Linux: How to Remove GNOME from a Debian Install - tech :: stuff (empirion.co.uk)

 

Xfce - Debian Wiki(just install xfce after you nuke gnome)

 

if you want to disable graphics boot, i would just do systemctl disable sddm/lightdm or whatever your login manager is btw. i find this much more intuitive than setting multi-user.target or by other means via config files.