[Mageia-dev] ANN: X11 now starts on tty1

[P. Christeas]

On Saturday 17 December 2011, Colin Guthrie wrote:
> Back in the day, text logins were the norm, graphical logins came later.
> Text logins got ttys 1-7... These days they are pretty much useless for
> 99.5% of the use cases ...

I'd like to question that.
You see, machines still have 'init 3' (or did Fedora remove that, too?), there 
is still people wanting a Linux box (not desktop) not to have X. And that's 
way more than 0.5% .
Or, X may be broken sometimes.
So, standardization of tty1=text makes sense, is not just an old habit. 
Because, you are *always* expecting to find a working tty console on a Linux 
box[1], while X only launches a bit later, if it can[2]. Putting the one that 
works in the default place is more reasonable, see?

Really, why don't you patch the kernel to start at tty7? you could call that 
"progress", too.

Some things in Linux could improve, but some don't need change. Unix legacy is 
what makes Linux great[3], IMHO. Part of that legacy (the "old school") is to 
have failsafe defaults, is to start with a minimal design and then build the 
extras on top. That's why Unix principles (or "hangovers") have survived so 
many decades, while other OSs have gone with the wind[4]. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy , last of the "Quotes"

[1] any machine that has a graphics card and a keyboard.
[2] see nvidia, ati
[3] back then, software was desinged by engineers. Time has proven that right.
[4] Win95-98 had no "hangovers". Then, win2k became POSIX again. 

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