I do much of my programming on a laptop without a graphical environment installed, and rarely ever type startx on my desktop system. My console setup is quite nice, and while it’s not for everyone, if you often find yourself opening xterm windows to do most of your work, you might be interested in dropping all that excess baggage and slimming down your system. There’s plenty you can do in a terminal, so saddle up and get ready to give a big screw-you to the overweight GPU-sucking graphical environments of the 21st century and take a trip slightly back in time to back when things were text.

Many people, myself included, misuse the word terminal (and sometimes also console) to refer to terminal emulators rather than a straight-up text mode. This confusion of terms is usually not that big a deal, but to clarify, I’m expressly discussing how to get along with a system where X11 isn’t installed at all — and how to make yourself comfortable in such an environment.