I’m neurodivergent (mainly ADHD), and because of that I’m not able to perform boring tasks because I prefer to play video games and browse the web. One alternative I’m considering is to get rid of the graphical environment and live (almost) exclusively in a tty environment, so I can avoid any useless distraction and start performing boring tasks with no excuses.

But I have two doubts about that:

  1. How far can I go within a tty environment? The web can be distracting, but also necessary.

  2. I don’t want to change my distribution unless it’s necessary, so can I uninstall gnome/plasma/lxqt…? I’m using Lubuntu.

#linux

  •  Parsnip8904   ( @Parsnip8904@beehaw.org ) 
    1•1 year ago

    Oh my sweet summer child! I loled when I read your post because I’m neurodivergent too and there are even more things you can tinker with in the terminal than in graphical environment in my experience.

    On a more serious note:

    1. Pretty far. Elinks is a text based web browser that can be used for basic sites like Wikipedia or man pages.

    It is also possible to have a lightweight display manager like openbox in another tty and switch to it for graphical applications. There are also kiosk type wms where you can launch a single application, though I’m not really familiar with them.

    1. You don’t need to uninstall anything. Just switch to an alternate tty by pressing CtrlAltF3 or some other number, login with your username and password and start your terminal journey :) If you ever need to fall back, you can switch to your original tty and login to your lxqt graphical environment.

    Other option is to just disable whatever login manager you use so that you get a tty by default. Then if you need it you can launch your graphical desktop with the appropriate command.

    I would start with the first option till you’re familiar with everything.