Hah that’s what I always had on Debian on my laptop back in the version 9 days (buster?). Nothing’s stopping you from doing it now with runlevels. I think with systemd it’s just systemctl set-default multiuser.target
You can then always get the full boot with systemctl isolate graphical.target
Might not be the exact command but it’s something like that for sure.
The default systemd target to boot into can be overriden from the kernel command line.
If the GUI ever gets broken, having a such fallback boot entry just for the (VT) console mode is invaluable. (The boot-entry can reuse the same kernel and initrd images from the regular boot.)
Is it too much to ask for the days when my system was nothing but a prompt in which I may or may not type “startx”?
That’s what I’ve got (on Gentoo).
I always ran
startx & exitto prevent someone from VT switching to a logged in console if my screen was locked :)VT?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_console
Joke’s on you. Ctrl-Alt-F1 Ctrl-z.
Right, that’s what the
& exitis supposed to prevent, since it’s already logged out.I think that is supposed to work on
startx && exitIf you switch to the VT with Ctrl-Alt-F1, and hit ctrl-z the process is suspended, but does not complete so it never gets to the exit.
At least that is my suspicion. I’m going to try it when I’m in front of a machine.
Hah that’s what I always had on Debian on my laptop back in the version 9 days (buster?). Nothing’s stopping you from doing it now with runlevels. I think with systemd it’s just
systemctl set-default multiuser.targetYou can then always get the full boot with
systemctl isolate graphical.targetMight not be the exact command but it’s something like that for sure.
The default systemd target to boot into can be overriden from the kernel command line.
If the GUI ever gets broken, having a such fallback boot entry just for the (VT) console mode is invaluable. (The boot-entry can reuse the same kernel and initrd images from the regular boot.)
Did not know that! Thanks for the tip!
Been a while but isn’t that very insecure? Gotta run
startx & exit;)Well, one can always uninstall the DE, right?
A fresh install of debian without DE will do that at least