Initially about 15 years ago because the laptop I bought did not have kernel support for the mobile gpu so I could not run a graphical desktop for a while, so I added kernel support for framebuffer on my GPU myself which was only a 7 line change (upstreamed to kernel) and then realized the framebuffer plus tmux and I was kind of set apart from youtube, so I wrote a one liner to pull raw video content from youtube and stream to the framebuffer with mplayer.

Overall I found there was almost nothing to do my job that actually required a GUI so did not bother fixing it.

The only software I tend to use today is a terminal and a browser, and graphical browsers are a hellscape of cookie approval prompts and ads and tracking. Thankfully today a local LLM can go to the web and fetch whatever content for me, so I am once again phasing out my use of web browsers.

It's not for me, but I can see the appeal - minimalism, distraction elimination, geek cred, and the sort of flow state one gets from working in a low latency, high muscle memory environment.

For me it's about having a distraction-free environment. I dislike having useless information cluttering my screen real-estate.

Even now that I moved away from text-only, I typically work only with fullscreen windows. All I want to see is what I am focusing on at the moment.