Is there anyone out there that doesn't use a window manager like KDE/Fluxbox/etc.?

What do you do without a graphical interface? I remember my days in DOS and how horrible that was. I know many people still love that and probably don't use a window manager...but how do you do things without it?

How, and what, do you do in a command line world? I'm genuinely curious.

When I self-hosted my website, I would seldom use a window manager on my server.

I used KDE a lot to get things working (opening a file for editing in konqueror was much easier than than typing in those paths), but, once I had it running, I seldom used a window manager.

I learned the commands I needed for maintaining my little server and would log in, do my maintenance stuff, and get out. I used mc a lot to move and copy files about and learned enough vi to to get by.

I fumbled my way into automating backups with scripts (I wrote the scripts using the editor in the window manager) and ran them with cron jobs.

If I needed a file manager, I could use mc. If all you are doing is maintenance, you can do an awful lot with mc.

James - I do use a window manager, but most of the applications that I use (web browser being the major exception) are command line programs: e-mail, news reader, irc, file management ...

There are advantages to each. For me a mix of GUI and CLI works best.

I'm an environmental scientist and when working from home, I generally spend most of my time on the console with emacs orgmode (http://orgmode.org/), while jamming out with moc (http://moc.daper.net/). Sometimes, I'll pop on Windowmaker (KDE too) to watch some youtubes or convert photos with darktable http://darktable.sourceforge.net/. If I need to tag bunch of music, or look for some fresh tunes, you'd find me in KDE.

I do most of my plain text and some PDF reading (http://linux.bytesex.org/fbida/) on the console. It's much more readable and less distracting than in X. Other things I do at the console: rip/burn CDs, watch movies, edit photos with dcraw/imagemagick/netpbm (when I'm feeling less artistic and more mathematical), IRC (irssi), gmail via alpine, read man pages, listen to http://pseudopod.org/ and http://zencast.org/. My window manager at the console is GNU Screen.

Orgmode is my bread and butter though at work and home. I use it for scheduling, outlines, report writing, TODO, and other stuff. I am required to use Windows 7 at work, which is no problem since emacs and orgmode work there too. I prefer working at the console at my slackware box from home though (great keyboard/better coffee).

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I have recently started digging into the cli. It is not near as scary as I thought it would be (used Windows for 5 years and then Mac OSX for 3). It is more powerful and does what I want it to do. No hidden traps.

I was having some mayor problems with my nvidia card around 2005-2006 (having used KDE since 2002-2003), and after struggling with it for a few weeks - in a moment of hopelessness/anger - I removed /usr/X11R6. I spent maybe two or three months without any "proper" gui, and coped just fine. Using mplayer to play audio/video (with "-vo fbdev" to watch movies), mutt for email, irssi for IRC, centericq for ICQ/MSN, elinks and links2 for web browsing (links2 recompiled with --enable-gui and running with the -g switch for rudimentary gui), seejpeg to view images, etc. (and of course heavily utilizing `screen`).
Then a friend convinced me to give X another chance, and to use fluxbox. I have since moved on to a modified dwm as my window manager of choice but I still hardly use any gui apps except for my browser.
However, my experience of DOS wasn't particularly bad, maybe the cli applications remind me of a simpler time.

And what about darktable speed? How experiences do you have? I installed darktable and I was testing it 2 days, it looks very well like Ligtroom
but it was working very very slow. I had never seen any any photo editor which was so slow like this one. I was very lucky when I found it, install but
the speed is horrible, I cant working anything on it.

I use ratpoison. It is based on GNU screen, but it is an X window manager.

So most of the time I'm working with the terminal (mutt, mc, slrn, etc. etc.) but I get the advantages of graphics when I use firefox and run mplayer.

You have to configure ratpoison yourself. Out of the box, all you'll get is, like screen, a blank screen. Google on .ratpoisonrc to see what people can do with it. It is TOTALLY keyboard orientated.

I use tmux a lot, with vim and elinks. Vim with the molokai colour scheme is very nice, aesthetically speaking. I do up simple websites in vim with just pure XHTML and CSS. I also use LaTeX for producing printed documents. No office program can compete with LaTeX for publisher-quality output. Quite a lot of my day-to-day tasks are done in a terminal - SSH to remote machines and to virtual machines on my own box; rsync; cdrecord and growisofs; ddrescue, dd, testdisk and others to rescue customers' data; Mutt and Slrn for quick and dirty mail and news; and more.

I prefer simple websites which render nicely in elinks. For casual browsing and "lazy" work I use XFCE, Opera, LibreOffice, Scribus, emelFM2 and Claws-mail. Bottom-line is this: I would far rather use a terminal emulator and mksh than KDE. One is a desktop on which you do your work; the other is a desktop that keeps saying "Throw away those papers and LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME!!!"

All those candy-coated windows with nice glowing borders? No thanks. A desktop is for working on. Not for looking at.

It's not slow on my machine.

since i'm a kid my first contact with a computer was windows xp :P then i passed through vista , with which i started searching about live cd of win xp and didn't find. just this was my start with linux. ten ubuntu 8.04 until they got out 10.04 and now i've also used 10.10 and it's pretty good. and now i have windows 7.

NOPE. i never (well in linux i was curious and learned some, just in case ) touched any CLI only OS. everything i had was graphical and working kinda out of the box(xp was preconfigures, vista too , and windows 7 detected everything also.ubuntu also did a good job to see my hardware)

I don't do things without a GUI.

I do without a Window manager or Desktop environment when I play 'resource intensive games'. In those cases I rename my .xinitrc to something else (using an alias) and just do 'xinit' which leaves me in X and then start the games from the console. Rest of the time I like light wm like awesomewm that are so light that they're almost similar to what I just described.

Some interesting posts here, I'll keep an eye on the thread.

The worst thing about the command line is that it expects you to spell things write.

I started with DOS 3.x, which was all command line all the way. When the first "graphical" programs came along, they were sort of like ncurses. Think midnight commander and that will give you an idea of, for example, Word Perfect for DOS.

So I may have had an advantage when I started with Linux. Thanks to DOS, I was already comfortable with the command line.

Never really worked with DOS very much, mainly dealt with Unix through my career as a tool designer. Bought a book on shell programming, and learned with that.

I can live with either, but insofar as a system I use every day, I use Gnome. I have systems that range from OpenBSD to several variations of Linux to one Windows XP install. I also have quite a cross section of virtual machines. Some have desktops/window managers, some don't, depends on the hardware capacity and need.

I just bought a virtual machine on a hosting service, which boots into runlevel 3. I have a very basic VM, (CentOS 5.5) with the resources at 512mb of RAM, and 40 gig of storage. That device is essentially a remote server for whatever services I am inspired to configure on it. Presently there aren't any public services running on it, and everything directed to it is routed through an OpenVPN tunnel. I set up an ntop install on it with a MySQL backend, and feed netflows from my gear here at home to it. I don't leave any systems here at home running continuously, and feel the VM serves my requirements very well.

Not running a desktop on that VM leaves enough resources for me to do my tinkering without need to purchase more RAM. More RAM equates to a little over tripling the cost of the VM, which is only $5/month if you pay for a year up front. That would only add 256mb as I recall. It's something like $12/month per additional 256mb. I have a few hundred meg of RAM available on it, and was thinking of setting up a snort backend on it.

I suppose it is just a matter of whether a desktop/window manager is needed for the instance. I don't use them if they aren't an absolute requirement.

Tab-completion?

I use XFCE, but with the exception of my browser and Qt Creator (Work), everything else I use is CLI.