It's time to talk about my writerdeck

Summary

tldr: I installed console-only Debian on an old laptop (no desktop OS at all) I added some packages to make it work better for writing: network-manager for connecting to hotspots while I'm away kmscon for custom fonts and more than 16 colors in the tty tmux for a nice status bar and rudimentary screen tiling, as well as acpi and light for battery and backlight details, respectfully neovim as my editor and vim-vimwiki to give myself a personal wiki syncthing to sync and backup my work I have an attention problem.A couple of weeks ago, I decided to convert my old laptop into a writerdeck, a dedicated writing device free from the distractions of the modern internet.Lots of folks build really elaborate offline devices for this, and I'd love to do that... someday. Right now I have no shortage of projects and the point is to get writing, so I used what I had: a six-year-old laptop which still runs great, has plenty of power, but isn't getting much use anymore.Crucially, this laptop has an excellent keyboard, and a matte screen, which makes it awesome to type on for long stretches, and functional enough in the daylight (I like to sit outside with my dog and write). It's also a System76 Galago Pro (not sponsored), which means it's already Linux friendly and has great support in the kernel.Setting up a tty instead of a desktopNow, you could certainly just use a regular desktop OS and keep it offline, although that's easier said than done. I don't think you can fully remove the browsers from a modern Mac or Windows PC. At least not in a supported way.Of course, I'm a Linux user, and I have any number of options. I could have gone with a simple desktop or window manager and just not installed a browser, but I wanted something that really broke the desktop OS muscle memory and forced me into thinking about my words with intention.I opted for a tty-based setup, using Debian (Trixie at the time of writing). Console only- no x11 or Wayland, no desktop getting in my way.Installing ...