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Comment by iib | Hacker News Reader

If anyone wants to try this without the intricate setup, if you have a linux system, you most probably can just press Ctrl+Alt+F3 and drop into a tty console directly. To return, you have to press Ctrl+Alt+F1 or Ctrl+Alt+F2. You also have multiple consoles, up until F12 probably.

I used to use this a lot when trying for a less distracting desktop, just like in the original post.

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Yes, and if you want it to boot directly into a tty mode run: sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target

As an aside: on some of my computers it is Ctrl+Alt+F2 but on others it is Ctrl+Alt+F7 to return to graphical mode.

I'm a proverbial greybeard and Ctrl+Alt+F7 used to just be what you did to get back to your desktop GUI.

FWIW, right now I'm typing this from Ubuntu Studio 24.04 and it's Ctrl+Alt+F2 to get back to the GUI. Ctrl+Alt+F1 shows you the bootup output scroll, +F3 to +F6 will give you a login prompt to drop into a shell. +F7 to +F12 just give me a blinking cursor un the upper right corner of the display.

I'm kinda surprised only +F3 to +F6 give me a shell login. Three isn't that many.

I think Ctrl+Alt+F1-F7 are Kernel provided Virtual Console things, and technically they can be connected to different things, I think like VC 5 -> /dev/tty5 -> a thread in /sbin/getty? The VC 7 used to be often opened up for X, but Ubuntu moved X to VC 1 at some point. I guess it's VC 2 now.

I do think it might be a more recent change related to a)gnome display manager, and b)systemd.

Maybe this have changed over the years, and I rarely if ever used these combinations to switch to TTY except for emergency (OOM, or window manager breakage), but on every Linux system I ever used, graphical mode was on (Ctrl+Alt+)F7.

Using CachyOS right now, gdm/mutter/gnome ended up on Ctrl+Alt+F1, I can't remember if it was crunchbang or some other older distribution, but been others too using various numbers. I agree F7 is most common though.

I even added this as an option in my Grub menu.

even worse! you can start a Emacs client evaluate (menu-bar-mode -1) and (tool-bar-mode -1) and put it on full screen

you missed the fbcon thing

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