It was fun, and I really gave it a good run. I tried hard to make things work the way I needed them to work, but it was not to be. At least, not yet. I have found evidence there are some developers who believe in the console “desktop” but the support for the idea seems to come and go. The main problem is lock-in, of the sort where you have to accept the whole thing one particular way, or you don’t get anything at all, at least in relative terms. The lack of flexibility is what hurt my effort the most.
Those who have been following may have observed I tested the idea with openSUSE, Etch, Lenny, Squeeze, CentOS, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, and a couple more I probably forget. I’m not sure I can pronounce any as reasonably close. I was trying to avoid building everything from scratch. Way too many Linux distros offer console packages which depend on X. Given FreeBSD is much easier to use that way, with opulent documentation on covering almost everything it can do (console mouse options were missing a lot of information), I wasn’t really willing to go with Gentoo or something similar. I’m not as handy with configuration from scratch in Linux the way I am with FreeBSD; the latter is much simpler. With Linux, I usually need some config tools, and there was usually some lacking for console operations.
The one reason I don’t go back to DOS is I am too thoroughly spoiled on the high resolution offered elsewhere. Besides, my laptop does not scale at all. If the display is 80×25 characters, it’s the same size characters as for any other resolution, just less screen space being used. I would not consider any form of Windows.
Yes, it was fun, and I learned a lot, but I am behind on the other work I have to do. I consider it a lost cause for me, because I lack the expertise to make my own. So I’m running Debian Etch again, and I’m not interested in testing any more until someone takes a notion to produce something closer to my interests.
