Comment by jancsika
6 hours ago
Hijacking this post for my own selfish curiosity:
Since Linux has these built-in ttys, why wasn't login done like this:
1. put a bare-bones x11 instance on the "login" tty with the necessary graphical/DE crap for login prompt
2. if the user enters the correct credentials in the graphical crap, switch the user to another tty and spawn a new x11 instance there for their graphical user environment/DE
That way you could use the "login" tty for the login prompt, accessibility apps, screensaver, win-at-space-invaders-to-login, etc. Then if stuff crashes at any point during the login attempt it just falls back to an empty tty rather than a user session or whatever.
GDM, at least, does: https://askubuntu.com/questions/910108/why-is-my-gdm-at-a-di...
This has stayed the case with the transition to Wayland: pressing Ctrl + Alt + F1 shows me the login screen, and Ctrl + Alt + F2 takes me back to the desktop.