Reasons to preseve X on tty7

[Les Mikesell]

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'.

> 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.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com