Reasons to preseve X on tty7

[Casey Dahlin]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> Casey Dahlin wrote:
>>    I don't really agree with your expectations of Linux as a whole.
>>
>> This idea has come about that there is an operating system called 
>> Linux and there are many flavors of it called distros. This is not, 
>> IMHO, the case. There are many different operating systems, and they 
>> all happen to use the Linux kernel.
>
> Maybe you don't remember it, but there was a time when there actually 
> were a lot of different operating systems in use, and they had really 
> annoying arbitrary differences.  Fortunately most of them died and the 
> ones that continued converged on some standards.  Different Linux 
> distributions are not different operating systems and they certainly 
> can't claim to be that and at the same time have a mantra of 'upstream'.
>

I'd say I can count on one hand the number of distros that aren't 
niche-only or effectively "living dead." We have the best of both 
worlds. Lots of OSes, but nobody cares about most of them so its all good :)

>> If somehow I could be transported 30 years into the future, and I 
>> could be sat down in front of Fedora, I'd be honestly disappointed if 
>> I recognized it.
>
> You are imagining the wrong scenario. I'd like to avoid having to deal 
> with all of the silly and meaningless changes that break things for 
> the next 30 years too, but that's not going to happen.  The real world 
> situation is that people have large and complex systems built around 
> existing OS behavior whether formally standardized or just inherited 
> from SysV that will break with program interface and device name 
> changes, and there are large numbers of people to retrain for every 
> user interface change.  Now, plan your next 30 years in the context of 
> keeping things working through them instead of being magically 
> transported past everything that breaks.  If you need to imagine 
> something, imagine that your bank and credit card accounts are 
> maintained on the OS you design and that the customer service people 
> you call are trying to guess the latest user interface changes as they 
> try to help you.
>
My bank had better be running RHEL, which is kept frozen in time for 
precisely this reason. Fedora should be about doing it /right/, 
regardless of how we did it yesterday. Keep in mind, the OS /is/ free.

--CJD