As a fun side project after learning how to manually install Arch, I am running Arch without any GUI or DE just to see how far it is possible to take such a system while still staying with the default terminal (so without even tiling window managers etc.), but does anyone know the actual prerequisites for being able to run Firefox and such from such an environment? I guess I will need Xorg at least? Just downloading Firefox and running it gives the (expected) error "no DISPLAY environment variable specified".
#Running Firefox on Arch without GUI/DE
rare quail
versed surge
Not sure how you intend to run a GUI only application on a TUI
Yes, do you need atleast an X graphical session, but at that point you're not in a tty anymore
You could crawl URLs with curl, get stream URLs with yt-dlp and use a video to ASCII program to watch them but that's super limited
rare quail
@versed surge Thanks for your good points here and tips - much appreciated!
And yes, you are right - an X graphical session would completely defy the purpose of my default-terminal-only approach, so I have instead opted to use w3m as a browser and will be doing everything tty on this setup. I am not after practicality (obviously), that I get from Mint, but rather just a super-old-school experience just for the fun of it, where all aspects of the system really feels like you never stopped playing ASCII NetHack 😀
ripe tiger
you should be able to do this by just putting firefox in your xinitrc and then running startx. from there you wont be able to control the window properties of firefox since you tend to need a wm to access the xlib functions needed to control windows, so instead you can use wmctrl, which is a small program that lets you use the xlib functions usually used by a window manager (such as XSetCloseDownMode()) from the shell. there may be a way to do this without using the xinitrc but im not sure about that.