The Anti-GUI Challenge!

That's kind of cheating and shouldn't be allowed in this challenge!

you can get image(and maby video i am not sure) players
that display in ASCII

Or you can use Emacs for everything. :-p

I hope no one will hang me for posting something sort of off topic. It's not entirely off topic...

quantumgravity, I wanted to respond to something you said in a different thread ( https://trisquel.info/en/forum/icedove-replaced-thunderbird ), which thread is now locked I know not why.

What you said was this:

"

"Do you beleive in the virtue of software freedom? If you think it's okay for free software to be useable only by a small minority of people, then in effect you're saying most people should use proprietary software "

This statement is _ridiculous_.
The "virtue of software freedom" is neither usability nor functionality, and nobody promised to you that free software has any of those two properties.
Developers try very hard to make it happen though, but if they fail - to what extent doesn't matter here -, they don't "force" people to use proprietary software because of that.
Supertramp indicated a way how to get the job done with free software; if the general public isn't satisfied with this, that's unfortunate.

If you argue like that you come to the absurd conclusion that everybody is guilty of forcing people into proprietary software who does not actively write completely satisfactory free software;
"

I think you've misinterpreted what I meant a bit. I never meant to say that anyone is "forced" to use proprietary software. Nor did I mean to say that people who develop free software are guilty of some wrong if the software they work on is not usable to any particular user base! On the contrary I'm very grateful to anyone who does *any* development work on *any* free software.

I was simply responding to what I perceived in SuperTramp83's post as an view that there is no problem, i.e. that there's nothing at all wrong with the present state of affairs wherein Add/Remove Software exhibits this bug or undesirable behavior (which could be extremely frustrating to many users).

If I could write my reply to SuperTramp83 differently, I would do. Immediately after I posted my original post I realized that SuperTramp83 may not have meant what I thought he meant at all, that he may have simply been suggesting a solution for anyone experiencing the problem I was highlighting, and I regretted having worded my post the way I did. That's why I posted my second post in that thread a couple minutes later.

I really did not at all mean to indict anyone of "forcing" anyone to do anything. I see how what I wrote could have been interpreted that way and I hope I caused no offense to anyone.

I was just responding to something I've seen wherein people hold people who don't want to use a command line or otherwise prefer simpler gui methods of doing things (the vast majority of people, by the way) with disdain.

Regarding your statement "if the general public isn't satisfied with this, that's unfortunate.", I agree entirely. The general public is on the whole not satisfied with most free software, and this is unfortunate.

Regarding your statement: "nobody promised to you that free software has any of those two properties.", that's not entirely true. There are people who are very vocal in advocating that the general public should use free software and claiming that GNU/Linux and Trisquel in particular is technically superior for the use case of most people.

In fact, I remember reading on the FSF website about activists dressing in full gnu costumes and handing out Trisquel cds and software freedom literature at a Microsoft store!

I on the whole agree that Trisquel is better than Windows in many ways and can be a good operating system for the general public. I've even set friends and family up with Trisquel and provided support for them. I've had some great successes with this. I've also run into some frustrating problems with technical inadequacies of Trisquel, and ultimately suffered some significant failures.

I love Trisquel and think it's great. I also always wish it were better, particularly in the area of usability. That's why I donate money to the project and post on the forums from time to time things that (I hope) are helpful.

Now, if you don't care if Trisquel and free software in general is not useable to the general public, that's fine! I respect that entirely.

However, I have encountered people who advocate that the general public use free software, claim that they will find it technically superior, sometimes even berate people for not using free software, and then simultaneously display total indifference when free software exhibits properties that make it unusable for the general public.

I want to stress that I am not accusing either you or SuperTramp83 of doing that! Not even a little bit.

I'm just saying that I have run into this. And sometimes I try to provide a reality check to people who over-estimate the usability of free software to the general public.

Anyway, I hope my post caused no offense.

How is this at least sort of related to the topic? Well, it is about command line versus gui... Yeah, I know I'm stretching. Please don't hang me :)

You can alternatively choose the framebuffer video output and get something watchable... unless it is considered cheating again (I do not really get why but anyway).

VLC will play videos over the command line, (use the cvlc command) but it won't keep the aspect ratio.

mpv > mplayer2

I think those rules are too complicated. What about "do everything in terminals, not emulators, real terminals: from Ctrl+Alt+F1 to Ctrl+Alt+F6 (you can drop the "Ctrl" once you are in those terminals)"? That allows "gpm" to get a cursor, the framebuffer to watch videos, ncurses interfaces ("bsdgames" maybe?), 'screen' to manage your windows (yes, inside the terminal), etc. That way, you are going to discover new things.

Sorry. ;-;

i think the point of this challenge was fun, education and to promote appreciating GUI's!