Can a Unix (Linux) System Launch a GUI from CLI Like (Apple/Microsoft) DOS? My first encounters with a CLI (and computers generally), involved booting to a command prompt, usually inserting a disc, and loading a full screen GUI program that was not windowed in what we commonly see today as GUI based OS. It went something like this. Boot >> Prompt>> Load Rocky's Boots >> Launch Rocky's Boots >> Quit >> Prompt I've never seen that happen with a Unix / Linux based system, loading directly to a graphical program not in a windowed OS environment - only ascii based programs like Space Invaders, or VIM. Does the ability exist to do the aforementioned DOS-like loading of 8-bit graphical programs (I stress, not windowed in OSX or Unity or whatever)? If not, why is it different?

Your question is hard to understand entirely, but I take it you’re asking if it’s possible, in Linux, to start a graphical program from a text-mode console, without the typical (X- or Wayland-based) GUI.

The answer to that is yes, and it always has been (on Linux at least). The mechanisms to do this have changed over the years. Currently, programs which support this type of feature usually do so using the framebuffer, aka `fbdev`, often using a library called `libdirectfb`. Examples include VLC and mplayer, so you can play videos without running an X or Wayland server. X and Wayland are also examples, and they also support `fbdev`, but they usually use other mechanisms (KMS with DRM, or specific drivers).

In the past, many games supported this using a library called SVGAlib, but that has not been supported for a long time. Examples of this include Doom, Quake, Abuse...