This Graphical Desktop Environment Is TEXT BASED?? 

and twin actually had GPM support, it just works.

I still install it on every machine

I had no idea that exists

GPM has been a thing since 1995.

It comes by default on Slackware

Definitely

Wait thats not true?!?!… JK, KDE user here.

They're not that far off though

@@dragonfly8568what people who have never used Linux think

@@WarmProp "I watch images and videos on the terminal using cacaview on my AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX with 64 Go of RAM." - Real Linux user

So TUI?

This is what is called a curses interface (it's not about expletives, I'm not actually sure of the etymology). I'm my circle of nerds we used to call this type of UIs "turbo vision" (especially if it had floating windows, "3d box effects", and menus with the action hotkey letter highlighted) for the name of the library that implemented a windowed curses API for Turbo Pascal - the popular IDE we were all using back then.

Or Borland's Turbo vision. The missing part is a library that allows developers to use TWIN-based gui elements such as scroll bars, pick lists, message boxes etc plus ncurses like screen handling in terminal-based programming languages for applications to seamlessly integrate into the TWIN desktop.

@@CasperLabuschagne Popular and effective back in the last century. It encouraged the use of keyboard shortcuts so ordinary people were much more efficient on their computers than they are today.

@@guss77 I know ncurses is a library that exists

Absolutely, this is the great thing about Linux - people make cool stuff for it, even if its something you might not use yourself.

There was a version of Quake somebody once did that was ASCII based and could be run in a terminal - I can't remember what is was called though.

@@terrydaktyllus1320 sure there is a "graphical" library that converts the image to ascii, libcaca if remember correctly

It's absolutely possible, just not practical

This is what I was thinking, this looks great for putting in a tmux session on a server or such

It exists for its own technical merits and great if someone can find a use for it - but I don't think it does anything that tmux doesn't do a bit better.

I'd prefer a TUI desktop over SSH, honestly.

@@zzco If it works for you then great! I will give it a try just because it's an interesting concept and I do a lot of Linux builds on low power devices (e.g. the original Raspberry Pi) so it may have its uses. Plus I am a TUI person also but stick within i3 as a desktop.

Agree very much, with wlroots it might be reasonable to roll something like it as a fully modern desktop.

you mean... like... Wayland?

@@cnr_0778 Like a *Wayland compositor*, you don't get this out of the box with the reference design (Weston) or any of the other current light weight implementations (Hyprland, Sway, etc). Of other immediately usable compositors available (Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment), none are minimal or designed to be.

@@orbatos Is that a bad though? What noticable difference would there be? (except storage maybe)

With sixel passthrough in yaft, you get images. I was working on it, but life happened and it didn't happen.

it is possible with wayland anyways, but wayland is not able to run over a simple serial line or SSH text session. That's the beauty of the Twin, it just texts.

@@supermariosuperfans Sure, and that is useful in certain contexts, but I want graphics for general purpose computing. Not everything is about remote dev and server admin work (and I do both).

Totally possible, essentially create an DRM device (direct rendering management), use opengles for rendering into that drm buffer and straight up render text characters to it. Just, font rendering is a pain in the ass lol

​@@MemplerI can vouch for this. If all you want is to put some latin on the screen, its easy enough. Add in Unicode, antialiasing, ClearType (subpixel) rendering, font layout (most known for "ligature support") and system fallback fonts support, you end up with a horrendous mess of libraries and slow code. All this to render what people considered as "bare minimum". If your system has font rendering libraries (e.g. Pango, DirectText/GDI/whatever), just use it. It's really not worth it.

Have you seen dwm?

@@cianmoriarty7345 dwm is not text

I hated Windows back then. It was worse than useless, clunky, messy, crashing every now and then. And there were no useful apps for it, either. But one manager in the company I worked for wanted it and I was part of the IT team, so I had to install it for him. And as a security I installed Windows for myself so that I was able to give some support for it. I hated that useless POS.

i agree i wont use it (i like my gnome) but it is still cool

You are mostly referring to ascii line drawing or the Unicode equivalent, which this actually uses, so it should not be a surprise. None of that went away and it is still heavily used in text mode interfaces even under Windows. Nurses is a library for building such interfaces and TWIN uses it to draw everything.

@@orbatos Sure, but I was thinking more of the "pixel-like" block characters of various shapes that could be used to build extended graphical objects. My point was that its been around for a long time, not that it's a "surprise."

I have been running the i3 window manager for many years and I already have the functionality and some more, that TWIN provides. However, I am increasingly supporting a commercial program running in a Linux terminal in a vertical market that still has around a hundred instances. I certainly can see a use case of running TWIN on those desktops since it is one easy-to-use environment allowing multiple terminals open in a GUI-like environment. In the long term, there should be an easy to use environment similar to ncurses that allows the development of text based applications that uses text-based interface elements styled on TWIN that provides scroll bars and message boxes etc. This will allow the development of terminal apps using the look-and-feel of TWIN. There will always remain vertical market apps such as a POS system, a sales system tailored to the automotive parts industry etc that will run in the terminal and the TWIN desktop is highly suitable for hosting such applications. Ideally I would like to see the old Borland vision of a text-based word processor, spreadsheet and database app running in a Turbo-vision like desktop on Linux. I might be the only one, but I still run the DOS-based ASEASY Lotus 1-2-3 compatible spreadsheet program in a DOS emulator on Linux and I have often wished that someone will port Borland's Paradox (or at a minimum dBase III or Clipper) to Linux. Yes, I can acheive the same results using Python + ncurses but it is not a trivial solution. If someone would port the old text-based WordPerfect to Linux, I would actually buy it right away and I am certainly not the only one.

This reminds me of the TRS-80, Apple 2, C-64, early MS-DOS era. In the early 80's all there was, was CGA. There were many interesting approaches to creating a "graphic" UI out of pure text data. When you only have 64k of memory, one has to be very memory frugal. And many have held on to that text based nostalgia and simplicity to this date. That's not a bad thing. I like to fool around with micro-controllers, many now are at the performance level of 80's machines. Some even run stripped down versions of DOOM. And text based UIs are a nice option for a small footprint.

@@peterbelanger4094 The most important aspect of a text-based UI is the API that allows those elements to be carried forward into the terminal/text applications. Circa 1989, Borland and Microsoft realised this and each worked on their own flavour of a text-based UI where concurrent applications within their text-GUI could run in 386 protected mode and use memory beyond the 640K DOS limit. One could even bake a pseudo text-based UI into a compiled Clipper application back in the days. Alas, Windows happened, Microsoft won the desktop battle and here we are today. For better or for worse, something similar to Borland's Turbovision never took off in the Linux world. I wish Borland had open-sourced their character-based applications, Turbo Vision, Paradox and even text versions of Quattro Pro and Sprint back in the late 1990's instead of simply dropping the products and selling off the Windows versions of their office suite to Corel.

wait until you learn about ascii art

Many years ago I reconnected with one of the guys who was doing an internship there at the same time and ended up working for that company for some time. He told me that guy later on went on to become an alcoholic, and his wife divorced him after he forgot to pick up their kid from daycare, and he barged in and caused a scene 7 hours (!!) later. After the divorce, one day he just stopped showing up to work and got fired. The office where he sat was left in the same state he left it there for years. It was unsealed only a few years ago. Apparently there was a pile of empty beer bottles, and other junk, as well as rats and finally stench, which was the reason for why it was unsealed. Nobody knows where he is now and we all assume he offed himself because he talked about doing it, or he's homeless

I hear a thousand little raspberry pis crying out in pain

Why not tmux? Do you really need an XDG compliant desktop for IoT?

@@orbatos Have not heard about tmux either. I used screen mostly so far. But After a brief trial tmux is closer to what I want in terms of layout management, but I really like mouse focus support and mouse drag scaling and relocation of screens, so probably twin is still better for me until someone makes a text manager with i3wm-like behavior and controls.

@@PterippiGaming tmux is available almost everywhere and is widely used in system maintenance and remote programming, for this reason alone I can easily recommend it for most of the needs you mention. Frankly I am surprised you never ran into it as even wrappers like byobu switched from screen to tmux around 10 years ago. Issues you are likely to run into are mainly key conflicts and how to ensure tty identification, which can both be worked around. There has been a recent anti-tmux thing going around but I have no idea why.