>>22681
I had done a purely tty+framebuffer setup on arch before, which would run on virtually any hardware.
It was a fun experiment to see how far I could push that setup as far as usability and there is plenty you could accomplish with it.
>can browse the web easily with elinks, which supports framebuffer mode for rendering html with images, can even compile elinks with gpm for mouse/touchpad/nub pointer control and javascript support and many web protocols
>links supports much less but also supports framebuffer and gpm
>no shortage of feature rich text editors, take your pick of nano/vim/emacs
>ranger is one of the most appealing file explorers, but others exist which can also support displaying images in a regular tty with sixels
one of the text only web browsers also supports sixels, I forget which one it was out of elinks/links/lynx
>cvlc/mpv/smplayer can all output to the framebuffer
there's also a way to play video in text mode, which is a neat novelty
>fbi/fbida is an image viewer for the framebuffer and works very well with keybinds to cycle through images and zoom
>fbpdf is a pdf viewer for the framebuffer
>moc is a nice music player with file explorer built-in, and will also play just the audio of video files that are selected
>irssi for feature rich irc client
>tmux for multitasking in a single tty session
now there are some caveats, most applications that will display to the framebuffer device will NOT work if you run them from within tmux, they detect they were not run from the bare tty session and error,
some of the applications will launch and grab the framebuffer device but are very buggy and can leave sections of the display unable to redraw when you exit from the application, so it is usually best to send tmux to the background if you want to use anything graphical, so you could have moc playing music in the background while browsing the web for example
now if I remember correctly, any application using the framebuffer is tied to the tty it was invoked from, so you can run different graphical applications per tty which is just mildly cumbersome