do we really need a desktop environment?

Just poking around here wasting time, discovered elinks and midnight commander.

elinks lets you do most of your surfing through text based pages
(images don't work). Takes some time but works for mewith only
30-45min on it do far.

midnight commander (package name is simply 'mc') is the same thing as
norton commander was 20yrs ago for windows. More than familiar with
THIS view of my system. Can do most of your basic tasks with it.

Have them both running in seperate shells from konsole, with a 3rd
shell open for a normal konsole.

Reason I'm poking around and asking is that I've ordered an Asus eee
pc 4g on friday. Comes with xandros (albeit an asus modified
version), that takes up 2.9gb of the 4.0gb SSD. Had the ability to
switch from the basic view to a full desktop. I'm wondering if it's
then possible to simply boot it into a terminal session (konsole if I
can get it working, simply for the multiple shells) and skip the whole
desktop environment.

Whole plan for it is to surf the net, check email, and read ebooks on.
 All of which can be done with elinks and mc. Might toss a game on it
later, but I likely don't need one on it. I could even toss on irssi
(for irc) and naim (for aim chat... not sure if pidgin works in text)
if I need more, and those are both text based as well.

Thoughts?
Received on Sun Nov 25 13:11:27 2007