TIL: MGR an old alternative to X https://hack.org/mc/mgr/
I dig the aesthetics
@julienxx
I ran MGR on my first Linux box, a 386sx-16 with (iirc) 10M RAM. XFree86 was uselessly slow but MGR was acceptable.
(linux-mgr was a bit of a sad puppy though. The XFree86 people were doing most of the VGA coding, and svgalib was adapting their code and mgr was adapting svgalib code...)
If you really like the looks, Rio, the Plan 9 GUI, looks and acts a lot like MGR at the user level.