Hah that’s what I always had on Debian on my laptop back in the version 9 days (buster?). Nothing’s stopping you from doing it now with runlevels. I think with systemd it’s just systemctl set-default multiuser.target
You can then always get the full boot with systemctl isolate graphical.target
Might not be the exact command but it’s something like that for sure.
The default systemd target to boot into can be overriden from the kernel command line.
If the GUI ever gets broken, having a such fallback boot entry just for the (VT) console mode is invaluable. (The boot-entry can reuse the same kernel and initrd images from the regular boot.)
Is it too much to ask for the days when my system was nothing but a prompt in which I may or may not type “startx”?
That’s what I’ve got (on Gentoo).
Hah that’s what I always had on Debian on my laptop back in the version 9 days (buster?). Nothing’s stopping you from doing it now with runlevels. I think with systemd it’s just
systemctl set-default multiuser.targetYou can then always get the full boot with
systemctl isolate graphical.targetMight not be the exact command but it’s something like that for sure.
The default systemd target to boot into can be overriden from the kernel command line.
If the GUI ever gets broken, having a such fallback boot entry just for the (VT) console mode is invaluable. (The boot-entry can reuse the same kernel and initrd images from the regular boot.)
Did not know that! Thanks for the tip!
Takes me back to my first Arch install in like 2008.
I used Arch btw
Well, one can always uninstall the DE, right?
A fresh install of debian without DE will do that at least