Let's play "Where is X?" (was: logout kills X)

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Felix Miata:

Indeed. It's what I had in mind when I responded. I'll give one guess where it came from..... Time's up. Yes, systemd. Who couldn't have guessed. It imposed a notion that I first noticed.... (wish to guess where?) Yup, on Fedora, home of Leonard P, under the aegis of RedHat, and Gnome. ....that X somehow belongs on tty1 instead of tty7.

This is quite wrong.  Neither systemd nor Lennart Poettering imposed such a notion.  The RedHat people had the idea of moving the X server to tty1 in 2008.  It wasn't Lennart Poettering's idea, as can be seen by reading the list of people on the Fedora doco of the idea, and it pre-dates systemd's very invention by two years.  It was motivated by reducing mode-change flicker during the boot process, by avoiding KVT switching, and at the time Fedora was using upstart.  Ironically, the idea was imposed upon systemd and Lennart Poettering, which had to adjust to accommodate it.

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12772915

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16104343

The problem with the Bourne Again shell package's clear_console is KVT switching, and similarly eliminating KVT switching fixes it (as I explained back in 2015, when I published a replacement clear_console that did not do KVT switching).  There is nothing special about tty1 here; and this is everything to do with a Bourne Again shell package tool that uses a bodge to clear KVTs, and nothing to do with systemd.