Does it really matter if I use Linux with a graphical UI rather than the command line? After all, for me Linux is just a replacement for Windows which allows me to use 10 and 15 year-old laptops without any problem, and I've been using it since Windows 7 was current.
I'm not a developer or a system administrator, so although I have needed to use the Linux terminal occasionally for configuration or other housekeeping reasons, I've only ever followed instructions I've found on help pages or forums. Until about a month ago it hadn't crossed my mind that there were fast, simple command line applications that I could use and maybe learn something about the OS at the same time. Then I stumbled across the small internet and gemini:// and I started reading about people who were doing exactly that. Why couldn't I?
I started with email, and in particular the Alpine client. Most modern graphical email clients are built in such a way that you just have to give them your email provider name and your email address and password and they configure themselves. I use Thunderbird, and it was very easy. With CLI clients though it's a case of modifying configuration files, and I referred to the man pages for Alpine and other web-based help to do that. I didn't get very far, mostly I think because I'm starting from a position where I don't have much Linux knowledge and although I wanted the whole exercise to partly be about learning, in the first instance I wanted to just get my email working.
Accessing my inbox and reading mail was no problem. The difficulty started with configuring Alpine to authenticate with the SMTP server to send email. Nothing I tried made any difference, so in the end I asked Duck.AI to give me step by step guidance on how to set it up. I'd never used AI much before, certainly never for tech support, and I was surprised at how good it was. I understand a little about how AI works, that all it does is take information from all over the internet and then organise it to suit your question, and I could see that it had drawn on data from my email provider help pages, Alpine documentation and elsewhere. The impressive part was how it put all of that together, fed it to me in small steps, and responded when I got error messages. But in the end I still didn't have a working installation, so I tried a different client, this time Neomutt.
I took the same approach, and this time Duck.AI got me to the desired outcome, dealing with plenty of error messages on the way, but dealing with them effectively. I think the difference may be either that the version of Alpine in my Linux distribution has some fundamental incompatibility with my email provider (although I asked Duck.AI how to check what SSL and TLS versions it supports, and they were recent enough), or perhaps the documentation is better for Neomutt and Duck.AI had more to work with. Anyway, it worked, it gave me the entire contents of the configuration file which I just needed to enter and save, then walked me through the error messages and permission changes they pointed to, and now I can send and receive email with Neomutt, which is a relatively recent fork of Mutt, so perhaps that helps.
I moved on to a Gemini browser. I had been using Lagrange in the GUI, and it's really good. For the command line I found Amfora, which was extremely simple to set up. It's quick, looks good and the bookmarking feature is excellent. Of course it has completely different key bindings to Neomutt, so at this stage I got a piece of paper and wrote down the essential commands for each - back, forward, open bookmark list, and so on.
Next it was a simple task to create all of the bookmarks I'd set up in Lagrange. I have a feeling that I have only scratched the surface of Geminispace so far, but that's a thought for another day.
Finally, I needed a web browser, and also a gopher:// browser, and I found that Lynx does both. It was as easy as Amfora to set up and it works well. Opening some URLs I see it doing things which are too quick to follow exactly what's going on, switching to https rather than http URLs for example, but it seems to work really well so far. It even redirected me to the 'lite' version of DuckDuckGo search, which presumably means that there is something clever going on either in Lynx or at the DDG end, but either way I was impressed.
The next thing is simply to start using the nano text editor which comes with my Linux distribution, and I've typed this with it. Now I just need to work out how to post it to smol.pub using Lynx because it has to be done via the web interface I believe. EDIT: I ran into problems here - I need to copy from nano and paste into the new post on smol.pub/posts, but it's not working. I'll go back and work out why later.
After that it's mostly about learning more about Linux, effectively starting at the beginning. The internet is swimming in helpful information for beginners, and given my positive experience with Duck.AI I won't hesitate to use that if I come across something I don't understand.
Email: kdan01 [at] posteo [dot] net