Lately my Framework laptop running ElementaryOS has been flaking-out, glitching in some way that causes the cursor to randomly move around in my editor (Micro) when I'm trying to write and doing other weird things like selecting menus and dragging things around when I'm using the GUI.
This morning when I was writing about the DIY Laserdisc player this caused me to loose a lot of work because while I was typing I wasn't looking at the screen and the glitch selected random blocks of text which were then erased and replaced with whatever I was typing next and all the while I was reflexively saving my work, ironically, destroying it.
I don't know if this is a hardware or a software problem, the complexity of both on this machine make it impossible to tell without lengthy chains of process-of-elimination and when I only have about 30 minutes a day to use my own brain, it's a shame to waste it on that.
But of course it's not a waste because as long as it's broken, I can't reliably do anything with the machine.
All of this heavily underscores the importance of replacing this setup with something simpler and more reliable. Such a replacement I spend a lot of time writing about (and even some time working on!), but there is a chicken-and-egg problem in having to use such an unreliable machine to complete this work.
Out of frustration with all this I remembered something from my early Linux days. When X11 flaked-out, or you just got sick of it you could easily flip over to the text-mode console using some key combination and X would go away and you'd be working directly with the "native" text interface of the PC. I assumed that this was something that had been taken-away in the effort to make Linux more usable, but as it turns out, it's still there even in something like ElementaryOS.
ctrl+alt+F4
In the old days, even without X11 alt + a function key would give you a new terminal. This was the primary way of doing more than one thing at a time before you could get X to work, and when X broke (as it frequently did back then) it was a way to get out, or switch to something more stable where you could work on getting X un-stuck.
This morning it's letting me work-around whatever the problem is with my laptop since there's no mouse or touchpad or touchscreen to get in the way.
It's a remarkably pleasant place to work, and provides a number of the things I want the computer I'm designing to provide. Of course it has none of the Swyfty things, but it's a step in the right direction, and provides a little shelter from the mess I normally have to deal with on this computer.
Just saying this sounds kind of stupid and obvious. No shit, a Linux computer has a textmode terminal, and if you use it, you avoid all the bullshit associated with "Desktop Environments", etc. Yes it's obvious once you're using it, but when you've spent years living in a prison you forget what the fresh air smells like, and sometimes that it exists at all.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026
Epilogue
After writing this, I tried to return to the GUI and it didn't go as planned. I thought alt+F1 or alt+F2 would do it, but it was more like alt+F7 (I just kept trying things). Worse though was the fact that when I got there, everything that had been running when I left was gone. This isn't how I remember it working back in the day, where you could flip between X11 and the text console with all your programs still running. I'm not sure what changed, but it was disappointing and something I thought I should warn others about.