When I first started out with Linux, I went full ricemode with Arch. For a while I tried running without X, using tmux heavily and browsing with lynx, only starting a specific X server for games.

You can definitely do it, but especially web browsing is not really feasible. There are tons of curses-like applications like mutt and irssi that work really well, but alas, I ended up going back to i3.

Still heavily riced, though, using Vim hotkeys wherever possible. For browsing, qutebrowser is fucking sweet!