Isn't significant use of a GUI inevitable even for a Slackware user, assuming he or she uses the Internet? I've never heard of performing internet tasks from a command line, and assume it's totally unfeasible. Also OpenOffice.

Everything, absolutely everything that you can do with a GUI can be performed from a command line.

Internet tasks?

Maintenance? Try yum
Web browsing? Try links or lynx
Email? Try pine or mutt
Newsgroups? Try nzbperl.pl and trn
Ssh, sftp, ftp, tftp? Duh.

Not a snowballs chance in Slackware. This is a REAL distro, without the 'Hold my hand, I'm useless' yum.....should be named yuck.

As far as a Slackware answer, I have a server that does not have X even installed on it. It hosts my websites, mail server and nfs files. Never used a GUI on it.

I think you should restate the question as using the distro as a desktop.

It is only relatively recently I have used X on Slackware. For the first 2 years of using Linux, I just did CLI. Even my older laptop, which I used daily for work, did not have X installed.

So...no, you don't need a GUI to use a computer. At least for 90% of tasks. I could think of a few things that would probably be impossible without a good GUI, like video editing, or photo editing obviously. But that is just splitting hairs.

Did I miss something? are you implying that you can not use GUI in Slack? I use slackware without gui on my server and with gui on my desktop. Just because slackware had been popularized as a strong server based OS doesn't mean you can't use it as a desktop. I have yet to run into anything that can't be run on slackware that can be run on other distros, including OpenOffice.

regards,
...drkstr

No its not what he meant. He is just saying that slack has a very powerful CLI that you can even ignore the GUI.

ok, good to hear. Sorry for the misinterpretation. Slackware does have a strong CLI, I ran it without gui for quite sometime before I spent the money on an actual desktop comp. But I do enjoy my gui these days

regards,
...drkstr

Any distro can be used entirely from the CLI. There are times when I work entirely from the CLI on Linux and FreeBSD although usually I prefer using a GUI.

What would commonly-visited websites (EBay?) look like from a CLI, then?

Kinda poor, considering you need to see pictures on that. But you dont NEED to go to ebay. I think you can do pretty much everything from the command line.

They only thing I am having problems with is mplayer on the console. I wanna get rid of X server and use my TV out from CLI, but it isnt working well. Mainly cause the nvidia drivers are for X, and they arent loaded on the console etc.

Eeh? Why don't you try it yourself using links?

I used non-graphical tools for a while - Pine & Mutt for e-mail, the brilliant MOC for music, MCabber for Jabber IM'ing, syntax colored Vim for XHTML/CSS editing, Snownews for news reading... and more. There are, however, certain situations, where the non-graphical (as in, no X) interfaces are somewhat inadequate.
While word processing for print can be done with LaTeX, it is useful to be able to see the final result. Also, with the highly graphical nature of web pages nowadays, Links does not give what I need.
I still use all of the tools mentioned - except with e-mail; I have come to appreciate Thunderbird very much.

None of the things you mentioned in your original post are impossible from the CLI. I think it depends on what you use the machine for. Certainly a server has no need for a GUI. However, I can't imagine my wife retouching photos or the designers where I work laying out circuit card traces without a GUI. On the other hand, my uncle retired from corporate IT at a large US retailer. He doesn't even understand why GUI's were ever invented.

Hismah: Sure I might need to go to EBay, at least in theory. Some of the bargains I've had, if not the items themselves, probably could not have been found elsewhere. And you indicate that it would look bad and/or unintelligible as far as pictures of items. That's what I thought was the case.

For the last word in GUI overkill, have a look at GTKtrue -a GUI front-end for /bin/true!
It was written as a joke, but it actually serves as a good example or framework for writing small GUI apps -even includes command line option parsing so you can create your own truths.

Get the package here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...1.2-i486-1.tgz

Or, build it from sources available here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...gtktrue-0.1.2/