Comment by charcircuit 6 hours ago
>w3m and its friends might fall into oblivion.
w3m's marketshare has always been nonexistent. It already has been in oblivion. Having a GUI is key to making a good web browser that will be used by people.
>your graphics driver isn't loading/working
This is a bigger problem that should be fixed ASAP. OS vendors should never critically break graphics on a OS like this.
>you can't log into the GUI due to a bug in the login screen;
Again, the QA department or automated tests of your OS vendor should not let this get released. If such a bug happened there should be a fix rolled out immediately.
>you are working on a server that is headless
Why do you need to run the browser on the server? I can't think of a case where you would want to use a text browser there instead of a regular browser on your actual machine.
>so I had to boot into a system via a USB stick, chroot into the system, then install the uninstalled desktop package.
It's disappointing that you had to manually fix it compared to it just downloading a fix automatically like what would happen on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, etc.
> This is a bigger problem that should be fixed ASAP. OS vendors should never critically break graphics on a OS like this.
> Again, the QA department or automated tests of your OS vendor should not let this get released. If such a bug happened there should be a fix rolled out immediately.
On a Linux system, if you go messing around with your configuration enough, you will eventually break something. You are effectively your own QA department in this case. As a kid I did this often, it’s part of the learning process.
> Why do you need to run the browser on the server? I can't think of a case where you would want to use a text browser there instead of a regular browser on your actual machine.
You just need to look something up quickly to fix something and you are in front of the server. Or you need to download a configuration file from GitHub and the URL is really long, but you can get there in a few seconds from a web browser. There are other means to get the files to the server but they require more effort, and you are lazy (as is your right).
> Why do you need to run the browser on the server? I can't think of a case where you would want to use a text browser there instead of a regular browser on your actual machine.
I've had to do that on my VPS a few times when I was debugging my Apache setup and needed to look at a web page that was only visible on the VPS, i.e., not available to the outside world.
> Why do you need to run the browser on the server?
I often need to authenticate against one of my Fediverse servers (as part of `toot login` for getting access tokens) and it's easier to open Lynx (which toot will do directly) for that on the server than copy+paste to and from a "real" browser.
One of my main uses for text browsers is scraping. They are typically lightweight and efficient, easy to script against, and I won't end up with premature optimisations where I immediately parse out small pieces of information and discard the rest of the page. Instead I store the dumps and can return to them at a later time when the problem domain changes or I have learned more about it.
Third party driver vendors can crap out a graphical login pretty trivially.
If your driver messes up DWM.exe it can blow your whole compositing service and draw every window in software mode which is, without exaggerating, 10000x slower than Direct Draw/GDI back in the day.
Ever played an old Direct Draw game on Windows 8 and up? It will crawl. The game can only be played with WineD3D, which is basically a Wine build for Windows and it has ddraw.dll hoooked to its own DirectX or OpenGL libraries. This is the only way to get these games running fast again.
On software rendering for the whole desktop, the same. A text mode browser (or Dillo, or Links2) can be runable at useable speeds before downloading an updated driver or patch.
By the moment you try Chromium or Firefox with no acceleration (even under current machines), when you have to run both DWM.exe, the rendering process and desktop done with software rendering in CPU, it will slow down like hell because on top of that it will run some JS crap in the browser for granted on vendor driver pages.
Maybe a current i7 can withstand it, but not for long as browsers love to spawn threads and eat RAM like crazy. Add a 4K display and say goodbye to performance.
Text-based browsers are useful in cases where you don't have access to a graphical display, for example:
1. your graphics driver isn't loading/working;
2. you can't log into the GUI due to a bug in the login screen;
3. you are working on a server that is headless, i.e. doesn't have a GUI installed, or are SSHing into a server/other machine.
I've experienced (2) a while ago and more recently there was another issue recently with upgrading breaking a system [1]. I also encountered the latter but was unable to keep the terminal open due to that bug (it kept switching back to the login screen), so I had to boot into a system via a USB stick, chroot into the system, then install the uninstalled desktop package.
[1] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/04/ubuntu-25-04-upgrades-...