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Comment by anonymousiam | Hacker News Reader

As a Linux console user since 1991, my biggest disappointment was the removal of console scroll-back (removed in 5.9). One can still use "screen" to to scroll back, but it just isn't the same.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/714692/how-to-scrol...

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TIL this was an intentional change. I wondered why it stopped working...

As I recall it was kinda twitchy because Linux let you have multiple consoles open, and the scrollback was handled via VGA text memory, which was divided evenly between the consoles. So if you changed the max terminals in… grub? You got proportionally more or less scroll back.

Yes, if you switched virtual consoles, the scrollback buffer would be cleared. Still, it was quite useful.

IMHO good riddance. The VGA console is about as useful as the serial console - your escape hatch when everything else fails. If you're allergic to X11/Wayland, the framebuffer console is much more featureful (it displays cute penguins in the top left corner!)

But (again, IMHO) you can also just run alacritty in cage or a patched dwm. Comes useful when somebody sends you a cat picture.

Don’t we all love it when the escape hatch only opens halfway.

There's no scrollback on fbcon either.

Either way, bike shedding. The serial console doesn't have "native" scrollback either - it must be provided by your own terminal emulator.

yesssss. 1993 is when linux found me.

i loved alt-F[1-4] on a vga screen i somehow managed to get higher (character based) resolution.

when i started runing xwindows, i still bounced out to the console with (afair) ctrl-alt-f2?

and just a few weeks ago, I forget why, but i instinctively was able to get a console on a messed up (xwindows or whatever it is today) console. good ol console.

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