Fedora 45 beta drags the Linux console into the 21st century

Fedora Linux 45 beta has arrived with Linux kernel 7.2, a release-candidate build of GNOME 51, and extensive changes beneath the desktop. The biggest surprise is that Linux's legacy in-kernel console – the text-mode interface normally hidden beneath the GUI – has been replaced with a software-controlled alternative. The …

[captain veg]

useful

"it has multiseat support, allowing multiple users to share one PC simultaneously with separate keyboards and displays"

Does it come with an RS-232 hub and a pallet of Wyse 30s?

-A.

[jake]

Re: useful

Those Wyse 30s would be terminals, not consoles.

[Sproggit]

Re: useful

Hmm... This might be [probably is] a bit pedantic of me ... but wouldn't the distinction between a "console" and a "terminal" really boil down to the physical connection to the host?

We still run literally hundreds of machines with "consoles", but with them all racked in a data center somewhere, the way we access them is via an RS232 card in a network hub that then connect to a specific serial port presented on the back of the host concerned. You can of course still have hardware that presents multiple RS-232-C sockets on the back of it, in order to communicate with the aforementioned Wyse-30 terminals [VT-100s... VT-220s... whatever] but at IPL it would only be the console port that came up with an admin login... and it would be the console port that had to be used in the event that general terminal support failed to start.

It's been a minute since I worked in that area of infrastructure, but I have this idea that the distinction between a console and a terminal really did boil down to "hardware addressability".

Do I have that right?

[jake]

Re: useful

"wouldn't the distinction between a "console" and a "terminal" really boil down to the physical connection to the host?"

In a nutshell, the console is a terminal that runs in kernel-space.

Most terminals run in user-space, even if you login as root (tisk tisk, naughty).

[Anonymous Coward]

Memory's a bit hazy, but...

A terminal is a thing that terminates, in other words, the keyboard and printer, or keyboard and screen in case of a "glass terminal", at the end of the serial cable at the opposite end of the computer. A console is the same thing, but connecting to the console port, which is also a serial port, but with the distinction of more administrative privileges. Just what those are depends a bit on the OS. On Unix you'd expect to see kernel announcements and certain kinds of log messages, like people using su. Once virtual terminals and even terminal emulators for graphical environments came along it all became a bit murkier.

Anyway, none of this seems to be really ground-breaking since 256-colour terminals have been around for ages, as with the other things. The real kicker is that it's now "accelerated" through kms and drm. And that gets you smooth scrolling. Whoop-tee-doo.

First thing I thought reading the head and sub was "I need none of this". More colours? I tend to turn them off anyway. Smooth scrolling? Turn that off everywhere since it's slow and distracting, even in browsers. Unicode support? It'll be useful to some but certainly in the Anglosphere it's more trouble than it's worth. Moreso when doing sysadmin stuff -- serious non-native speakers run fully English for administration anyway since that's much easier to deal with, say through the hallowed practice of web-searching for the error message. In other languages, too often you have to guess what the original was in English and then search on that. The best you get there is that unicode lets you include "smart quotes" and emojiiiiis and such, crap I do not need when trying to solve computer trouble.

So this sounds like a wonderful showcase of nice features that, at the end of the day, I don't need, but that do put demands on the system that I could do without. Unless they've managed to make drm and kms a lot less painful than they used to be, with poor hardware support and finnicky configuration with worse wobblies and tantrums than Xorg on its own ever threw.

But then, FreeBSD shipping for production with an all-new-all-singing-all-dancing kms-and-drm VTY driver that didn't support switching back from X, it'd just leave you with a black screen forcing a reboot to get the console back, may have left me a bit soured on this sort of thing. That and Red Hat and their penchant for adding wonderful and awesome software from the likes of lennart poettering. I really don't like dependencies, much less inescapably forced ones. And kms and drm always seemed needlessly complex, convoluted, complicated, bothersome, vexatious even. No wonder it took so long for this to get up to shipping quality (qv).

[Henry Wertz 1]

Re: useful

I actually did have a DEC VT102 hooiked up in the 1990s. With screen I could do multiple text sessions. My parents found my IBM Model M to be too loud so in the evening I'd go to the basement, had a lengthh serial cable running along the steps to the VT102. The cable was probably too long so I kept burning out serial ports, buying thiose cheap ($15 or so) 'superio' cards, disabling the ide, floppy, and parallel ports so I had another pair of serial pors to burn throguh. (Possibly the chips were '12V tolerant' buit not really and the DEC's 12V burned them out. But I suspect the length was long and burned out the drivers on them.)

[jake]

Re: useful

To this day one of the first things I do with a new system is hang a so-called "dumb terminal" off a serial port (USB usually these days) and throw it a login. Even this fairly modern laptop has a dumb terminal hooked up. Granted, that's a terminal, not the console ... but it's still handy for all kinds of things. Note that you can tell the kernel to use a terminal as a console instead of a GUI screen.

_{Also note that with usable distributions, you can have multiple "virtual consoles" that can be hot-keyed between.}

[Anonymous Coward]

With Caveats

Note that you can tell the kernel to use a terminal as a console instead of a GUI screen.

Using a USB-connected terminal as the "console" is less-useful than using one connected via COM port, because to catch the boot-up messages, the console must be reassigned pre-boot, and I've not seen bootloader parameters allowing reassignment of the console device to a USB device. To a COM port-connected device yes, but not to a USB device.

[jake]

Re: With Caveats

The boot messages are written to disk, and are readable even if the boot fails, simply by booting with a so-called "recovery" disk (or thumb drive, or whatever).

That said, I've used a USB connected dumb-terminal as a console for over two decades in various places, mostly on remote headless systems. Works fine.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: With Caveats

I had had a client running SCO Xenix, and their integrated business management application on top of that. They had five serial terminals (Wyse-50s) and two serial printers.

One day they booted up their system after having made their monthly "extra" application-data tape backup and UPS test.

"Something happened with the computer" and they called me. I found the on-disc boot message log wildly scrambled and useless.

After going to single-user mode, running the appropriate fsck command and rebooting, comparing the on-disc app data to the backed-up version on tape, no discrepancies were found, and the system ran normally.

I had thought, "I would have had some idea what had happened if they had had a proper printing, serial console, such as a DECwriter or Model 43 Teletype, attached to COM0."

I did not suggest they get one, for I knew the director would reject the idea on the basis of cost.

The "kernel message log on disc" is sometimes useless.

[Liam Proven]

Re: useful

> Also note that with usable distributions, you can have multiple "virtual consoles" that can be hot-keyed between.

FWIW Fedora does this, even with kmscon.

Some of my PCs have 2 graphics outputs; some of the laptops have multiple GPUs, attached and operational concurrently. E.g. the integral Intel GPU drives the internal LCD and the nVidia chip drives the Displayport.

What this _in principle_ lets you do is say:

* User 1 is on the Intel GPU, internal keyboard, and internal pointing device.

* User 2 has a USB keyboard, USB mouse, and Displayport screen.

And with no additional hardware, both those users could have their own independent login sessions and each feel like they have a PC to themselves. Give them a USB headset and they could have sound, too.

In theory, if a laptop had a VGA port as well, there could be three concurrent users, each with a GUI, each with 6 virtual consoles, each with their own keyboard and mouse... with no additional hardware and no serial terminal.

I don't need it. I am 1 user and I have, my wife maintains, far more computers than is sensible or necessary.

Even a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 has 2 HDMI outputs and could do this.

But if I were a schoolkid in a poor country, with a bunch of cheap old screens, keyboards, and mice, you could take 20 laptops and make sure that _60_ pupils all had their own "computer" each, all at the same time. That is legitimately very useful. That is what "multiseat" support means.

[theOtherJT]

Re: useful

I mean, hell, get an old cast-off workstation from 7 or 8 years ago with a bunch of PCI express slots, whack a few of those cheap single-slot, 4 head GPUs in that are basically designed for running shop-window multi-monitor displays and you could easily be looking at 20 users on one machine for only a few hundred bucks.

I find myself really keen to try this now. I'm pretty sure I've got an old first generation Epyc board around here somewhere...

[Anonymous Coward]

Multiseat Linux

I think you all are proposing to do things "the hard (and relatively expensive) way."

How about using a bunch of old PCs and/or RPis running X-terminal emulation software, connected to the 'mother ship' via Ethernet?

[ICL1900-G3]

Re: useful

A good point, never thought of it like that. What a great idea.

[robinsonb5]

Re: useful

It's a neat future but it amuses me that it's being touted as something new and revolutionary.

I remember tinkering with a multi-seat Xfree86 setup more than 20 years ago (man, I feel old!).

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: separate keyboards ?

By pointing the webcam at the keyboard it allows multiple users to use the same keyboard simultaneously. By recognising the individual hands by nail colour and hairiness of knuckles, it directs their input into separate processes.

The output is drawn at the same time on the same screen but in different colours, users each wear a narrow band coloured filter goggles to view the text meant for them.

[jake]

Re: useful

"I don't need it. I am 1 user and I have, my wife maintains, far more computers than is sensible or necessary."

I use the option(s) for various things, kernel debugging being predominant.

My wife would agree with yours.

[Anonymous Coward]

Serial Cable Lengths

I had a PC/serial cable/terminal setup for one of my clients, whom I warned in advance, I in no way guaranteed would work, because the cable length they needed was beyond RS-232C specifications. But it did work without problems (note it used hardware flow control).

Your problem was likely the lack of +/-12VDC tolerance you mentioned.

[jake]

Re: Serial Cable Lengths

"because the cable length they needed was beyond RS-232C specifications"

Back in the day, Gandalf had the magic smoke corralled well enough to get around that problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandalf_Technologies

[Anonymous Coward]

Terminal -> Host Selectors

Our uni had a home-grown solution: all the terminal connections (dedicated and modem) ran to a PDP-8e, which acted as a front-end processor.

At the FEP's '#' prompt, you could give the TRAFFIC command to see how many users were connected to each of our two mainframes. Typing Control-A connected you with one mainframe, and Control-Q connected you to the other.

[DS999]

I think where it might be useful

Is if for instance you have IP terminal servers connected to every Linux server in a rack, but also want the ability to plug in something directly if you're at the machine. You'd get your own console separate from whoever might be logged in via the terminal server. That would not be the case with VT, it connects all keyboards to the same single console.

[Liam Proven]

Re: useful

> Does it come with an RS-232 hub and a pallet of Wyse 30s?

1. Ho ho

2. WTF is an RS-232 "hub" supposed to be?

3. Yeah yeah, been there done that too. I am also old. I was working with Unix in my day job before Linus started work on Linux.

Wyse 60 would be more appropriate.

But under your snark, there's a real use case here.

Say you have an onboard Intel GPU and an nVidia. You can have 2 screens. Both share the same console, though.

With kmscons you could have 2 different text consoles. That's handy, right? I could use that.

There is no such thing as an RS-232 hub but you can have an Ethernet terminal server. But that's expensive extra hardware. This works with no additional hardware needed at all.

But, better still for some use cases, the external screen could host an entire separate user session. This will need some extra software tooling which I think isn't there yet but what it means is a multiuser PC with no extra hardware at all. Partition the existing system into 2 or 3 user sessions. More if they have USB screens.

That could save schools a lot of money, for instance.

[Maurice Mynah]

Re: RS-232 "hub"

I think they were also known as "concentrators". In the early days of desktop computers but before ethernet was a thing, your desktop (I'm avoiding the term PC) had a serial connection to your organisation's "mainframe", whatever that might be, so you could get and send emails, and use Kermit for file transfer... happy days.

They were mostly ripped out of office environments when ethernet (usually 10Base2 coax) came along and desktops came with ethernet interfaces.

[Anonymous Coward]

RS-232C "Hub"

There is no such thing as an RS-232C hub

You are correct. I suspect what the poster meant was a multiple-port serial board connected to an external box which contained the 25-pin RS-232 connectors.

AST made a 4-port version. Computone made 16- and 32-port versions.

[Sproggit]

Re: RS-232C "Hub"

Exactly this...

Back in the day, as the industry was making the switch [no pun intended] from e.g. largely serial-port-driven connectivity and synchronous [polled] lines to green-screen terminals, the big network vendors of the time - your Bay Networks, Racal Datacom, Wellfleet, Nortel, offered families of flexible hubs that all looked a bit like this:-

https://www.txo.com/products/popular-telecom-platforms/infinera/infinera-dtn-roadm-platform/

The details varied, but in general terms you'd have a 19-inch rack-mount chassis that could take anywhere up to 8-12 "blades" or "cards" of network connectivity.

I worked with some [elderly] Racal Datacom "INX5000" hubs like this. They had a mid-plane chassis, meaning that each card consisted of a "front half" - where all the logic and expensive stuff was placed... and a "back half" - where the physical connectivity was presented. The sort of cards offered included e.g. RS-232 Serial, 10Mb Ethernet "dumb hub"; 10Mb Ethernet Switch and so on. These things were designed from the ground up to support multi-protocol local area networks, at a time when no clear standard had emerged, and most companies had a hodge-podge of competing designs and protocols that needed to be made to "play nice" together.

The solution still in use today takes something like that, fits a "serial card" to the chassis, then connects each of up to e.g. a dozen serial ports on the card to a different "Console Port" on a Unix host. Even though these were serial cards, they were designed for this use case and you could associate multiple VIPs with a single card so that you could effectively telnet directly from your PC, over the lan and out through a serial port designated by the destination IP address.

Remarkably useful before the days of blade servers and virtual machines...

[jake]

Perhaps ...

... someone should remind Fedora Red Hat IBM what the point of a console is.

_{One wonders how long before that logo becomes an advertisement ...}

[Henry Wertz 1]

Nice

Sounds nice! And in terms of compaibility, the 'text' console is already usually using kms (kernel mode setting) and drm and such anyway and not running in true text mode. As I found out futzing with nvidia drivers and got a black screen LOL. (i had ssh running so I could sort thins out that time. I suppose I could have rebioted instead.)

[AdamWill]

the best benefit...

"Some of the benefits of kmscon may sound a little theoretical"

They should've got me to write the feature page, because by far the *best* benefit is that kmscon uses xkb layout configuration. The same configuration your graphical desktop uses.

Yes, you *finally* do not have to deal with your console and your graphical desktops using different keyboard layout configuration mechanisms. It only took 30 years or so!

(ok I think you still have to care if you ever type during initramfs phase, e.g. for encryption passphrases. sigh. but so close!)

[Liam Proven]

Re: the best benefit...

> They should've got me to write the feature page, because by far the *best* benefit is that kmscon uses xkb layout configuration. The same configuration your graphical desktop uses.

Huh. That's not bothered me since I tried to learn to touchtype on Dvorak about 20 years ago, but I can see the benefit.

[ICL1900-G3]

Re: the best benefit...

Dvorak! Respect!

[Liam Proven]

Re: the best benefit...

> Dvorak! Respect!

:-D

I did get fairly quick after a few brain-bending weeks of practice.

The trouble is, I never got _quicker_ than I already was at 4-finger typing on QWERTY.

I _can_ touchtype properly, but I'm much slower at it. Moving my hands around in a very much non-official fashion, I'm quicker, more accurate, and I still don't need to look at the keyboard. I haven't even glanced at it once to write this whole comment.

Fun aside...

The chap who invented Dvorak was a descendant of the great Czech composer Antonín Dvořák. But the keyboard inventor was American, and didn't spell his name the proper way for Čeština: DVOŘÁK.

So "Dvorak" is the keyboard, and "Dvořák" is the composer.

[Bill Gray]

Re: the best benefit...

My violinist wife and her colleagues all say they're playing music by a guy whose name sounds a bit like 'Dvor-zhak'. I'm not sure if the keyboard gent got his name Anglicized in pronunciation at the same time the diacriticals were dropped, but I've always heard the layout pronounced something like "Dvor-rak". [0] (Didn't realize the two were related. Nor that John Dvorak was the keyboard guy's nephew.)

Re typing speed : mine sped up a lot when I made the transition, at age 30 in hopes of alleviating carpal tunnel problems. But I was/am a Biblical typist on QWERTY ("seek and ye shall find"). I figured that I ought to learn to touch-type on the new layout, both so I'd be faster and because I wanted to be able to do it without needing a specifically Dvorak-labelled keyboard. As with your experience, it took a few weeks, maybe a month, to get used to it.

[0] A usually reliable source ^{[citation needed]} tells me that "[August] Dvorak's family in the U.S. pronounces it /ˈdvɔːræk/, with an English r."

[LionelB]

Re: the best benefit...

I suppose that 'zh' (presumably that's like the 's' in "vision") might be the closest you'll get to the Czech 'ř' sound, but it's actually not even that close – 'ř' is more trilled/guttural/phlegmy-sounding (at least to my ears). I suspect you need to be a native Czech speaker to have any chance.

(When I was a small kid my mum had a Czech friend who used to perform a little tongue-twister ditty based around the 'ř', which we found absolutely hilarious.)

[AdamWill]

Re: the best benefit...

we (distributions) have got quite good at hiding it, but if you're on the end doing the hiding it's just hideous. the cracks show with various awkward cases where the name of the layout you'd most likely want (for a given country, language, whatever) isn't the same in both styles. Or, and this one really grinds my gears, "switched layouts". This is the case where you need two layouts, one to input Latin characters, one to input native characters - e.g. if you need to type Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew or Arabic characters. xkb handles this by letting you configure as many layouts as you like, and a key combo for switching between them. kbd doesn't have this; in kbd, "switched" layouts are implemented all within a single definition. Each letter key is mapped so that with no modifiers it types a lower-case Latin letter, with shift it types an upper-case Latin character, with AltGr it types a lower-case native character, and with shift+AltGr it types an upper-case native character. Then there's a key combination that's mapped to AltGr_Lock, so hitting the key combo effectively "switches layouts" by locking or unlocking the AltGr "key" (AltGr is usually also mapped directly to right alt, so you can switch layouts for a character at a time by holding it down). Distributions need to know (somehow, and don't get me started on how...) that when configuring one of these layouts, they need to have the xkb config be e.g. 'us,ru', but the kbd config be just 'ru'.

You ever need to get a party to wind down, invite me and have me explain Fun Facts About How Typing Stuff Actually Works. People will be leaping for the exits or falling asleep within seconds.

[FeRDNYC]

Can you scroll back?

Sounds good regardless, but if kmscon restores console scrollback (nerfed in 2020 due to some code issues and a "probably nobody uses it" argument), then I'll be very happy to see it make its debut next month.

I only have reason to use it maybe once every year or two, but that means I've tried 3 or 4 times since it was removed, and it's been annoying every time.

[AdamWill]

Re: Can you scroll back?

Rejoice! I just tested and yes, yes you can. shift+up / shift+pgup work. You can even do it with the mouse wheel. I also am a fan of this!

[Anonymous Coward]

No thanks.

I still have an old HP box with ILO, and HP will happily sell you a license for lots of money the moment the boot screen is graphical.

I'm OK with text only - the benefit of a console is exactly that it's relative gimmick free and uses very little bandwidth. The latter is very handy when your comms is limited.

So, nice idea, but I hope they leave the classics intact. They're classic for a reason :).

[FeRDNYC]

Re: No thanks.

This only applies to the graphical output on the machine's local display device (hence the "kms" name), how could comms possibly be limited to the framebuffer?

If you're logging in remotely, you're not using kmscon.

[the spectacularly refined chap]

Re: No thanks.

If you're logging in remotely, you're not using kmscon.

Enterprise grade server is a whole different world to consumer level hardware. Systems like HP iLO are embedded at the hardware level. Log in to a remote console and you are indeed seeing what is being shown by the graphics card - it is wired in to allow that.

Equally your keyboard and mouse activity appears to the host to come from local USB devices and any media images you mount appear to be physically, locally inserted.

[FeRDNYC]

Re: No thanks.

And if you're doing that, you're already using a graphics protocol over the wire, not using "text-only" communications. So, kmscon will make zero difference to the bandwidth required!

[hri]

devolution solution

IMVHO the 21st century hasn't been so hot ... women and OS have got fatter, merchants slimmed-down their offerings and academics foisted one M-theory unikorn after another upon a baffled yeomanry ... < dark matter, virtual matter, airy matter . no matter ... > seeming to forget it's all pre-1928 hydrodynamics. Probably best we devolve to the late 1800s when both knowledge and ignorance made sense, French Dadaists stayed in Marseille & superposition was something young gallants did with red, yellow and white roses.

[blu3b3rry]

Re: devolution solution

aManfromMars1, your cousin is here.

[JLV]

Re: devolution solution

> women and OS have got fatter

For once I think gender neutrality would be quite, quite, appropriate. You think us guys have all been hitting the gym 24/7??? Been staring intently at too many steamy Harlequin covers? Sporting a 6 pack yourself, eh? :D :D :D

[xc8]

I like this kmscon , as I read you can run even emulators there hehe...

- I have to admit I am sick of OS bloat and Fisher-Price or KBloat GUIs

[Will Godfrey]

No Thanks

The further I read the more it seemed real control was being taken out of my hands. Gnome was the last straw!

[Liam Proven]

Re: No Thanks

> Gnome was the last straw!

Fedora is also available with...

* GNOME Classic pre-installed and ready to use

* Xfce

* MATE

* KDE Plasma

* Budgie

* Cinnamon

* LXDE

* LXQt

* Sway

* I3

* COSMIC

* Miracle

* Plasma Mobile

* Sugar

I don't think any other distro offers so many pre-built pre-integrated ready-to-use options. Ubuntu ha Unity as well but Fedora wins here.

[KurzweilGeist]

Kmscon requires systemd :o

Problem: Call to Reboot failed: Access denied as the requested operation requires interactive authentication. However, interactive authentication has not been enabled by the calling program.

Workarounds: Use systemctl variant of these commands:

Reboot in a VT: systemctl reboot

Shutdown in a VT: systemctl poweroff

[nielsdg]

Just to be clear, it's not the original team that picked up kmscon again. It's someone from Red Hat who started maintaining this

[Alan Mackenzie]

I've actually tried to use kmscon ....

.... on my Gentoo system. It didn't match my expectations.

Mainly, this is to do with its unfortunate use of of libxkbcommon, the X keyboard library. I say unfortunately, because xkb is unfathomably complicated (even its maintainers have given up, saying euphemistically on their website that the documentation is "a work in progress"). By contrast, the Linux console keyboard has equal capability, and is fully described in the wonderful man page for keymaps by Andries Brouwer, unchanged since 1998.

There is only a negligible amount of keyboard documentation in the kmscon man page; essentially it says "you can get a German keyboard by setting the option --xkb-layout=de". That's it. There's no documentation of where this "de" comes from, or how to setup one's custom X-Windows keyboard layout in kmscon. After spending several days of fruitless experimentation and searching of the Web, I came to the conclusion it's not possible.

kmscon's keyboard layout is hard-coded, with the exception of the keys for printable characters. It appears to be impossible to set up <Alt><Fn> to switch VTs (virtual terminals). It appears equally impossible to set up any key sequence to switch to VT13+. As for VT1 - VT12, there is only the clumsy <Ctrl><Alt><Fn> available. As I said, these are hard-coded.

kmscon hijacks a frightening number of key sequences for its own purposes, ones which its maintainers assume no program will ever need. Clearly they're not Emacs users! Amongst those hijacked key sequences are <Shift><Up> and <Shift><Down>, used for scrolling the tty a single line down or up. In fairness, it is possible to unconfigure these key sequences, but that's an arduous job because there are so many of them.

Yes, there is unrestricted Unicode available on this console. But the lack of this on the Linux console is not an accident, it's deliberate policy. Some weeks ago I submitted a patch to the Linux console team to allow the unrestricted use of Unicode on it. An LLM program detected a number of violations of kernel protocols. Other than that, there's no sign anybody actually applied and tried out the patch. The maintainer, Greg Kroah-Hartmann, expressed a positive lack of interest in it, saying that the Linux console is scheduled for removal from the kernel, to be superseded by kmscon. Nobody seems bothered that kmscon might not be up to scratch. :-(

kmscon requires a frightening dependency list of user-space libraries. It is unclear to me how useful it would be in a broken or incomplete system. For example, would it work in a rescue system, or during installation of Gentoo. By contrast, the Linux console is supremely reliable, always working if there's even a running kernel. Nobody has said anything about this.

There is no public mailing list for kmscon, so it is difficult to communicate with its maintainers. There seem to be facilities for Github users, but that's about it.

Most worryingly, kmscon is controlled by RedHat. This is the same RedHat that made Gnome (and much more egregiously, udev) available only under systemd. Once the "competition" from the kernel's console has been removed, they could do the same with kmscon. Does anybody still trust RedHat?

So far, kmscon doesn't appear to have users. I have searched in vain for a review of kmscon from a power user which says "I've been using kmscon for <n> weeks and I'm very happy with it.". I've tried, and failed, to set it up to suit my needs. I don't know what I'll do when the kernel console team removes the console from the kernel. Maybe I'll switch to one of the BSDs, though their consoles aren't much to write home about either.

[JibberX]

I got a bit uncomfortable and squiffy with the Red Hat Fedora IBM setup and IBM doing some pretty brutal "haircuts" losing (read firing) some of the people that actually maintained useful things.

Additionally, I wasn't jiving with some of the "opinionated" changes to default GNOME applications which make, I assume, maintenance more tricky and unpicking it taxing.

Fortunately for everyone Linux is a total free for all and no doubt Fedora remains lovely.

Personally, I have found CachyOS is (currently) the right combination of bleeding edge and the maintainers not changing things for what feels like many years of familiarity.

Finally, I slipped into the world outside of GNOME and KDE and landed on the embarrassingly named Dank Material Shell which I use in combination with Niri and its simply incredible and I recommend to anyone who wants to kinda break out of the 90s WIMP paradigm we have all settled on whilst being a retro inspired tiling window manager.

[steelpillow]

Wot no terminal devices

AIUI, kmscon cannot drive an old-style dumb terminal, it basically emulates terminal functionality and throws that at a graphics device.

I kinda feel uncomfortable that it is not universal enough to do both. Do one thing - terminal display - and do it everywhere.

[Anonymous Coward]

What about when DRM fails ..

I don't think this is such a good idea. If you have driver issues for your graphics card you really just want the plain old frame buffer mode of a simple terminal to run a few commands, using DRM as your virtual terminals could mean you have just shot yourself in the foot with no plan B to get yourself out of trouble. KISS applies here.