I've always been curious about an idiosyncrasy of Xorg that seems to happen on every machine I've tried it on; whenever I start a new X instance on a TTY using startx manually (that is, without the aid of a display manager), switch to another TTY, and then attempt to return to my original TTY, X's framebuffer breaks and I'm dropped to my original shell with X still running. Hitting ^C or ^D will stop X, but I'll have to run startx/xinit again, losing my original session. I.e:
CTRL+ALT+F1
$ startx /usr/bin/xterm -- :1
CTRL+ALT+F7
CTRL+ALT+F1
Will break my X buffer on TTY1. It seems that applications that rely on Wayland/Mir for composition handle TTY switching like I'd expect, but for applications that use X that aren't started with a display manager like LightDM, being unable to return to the X session I manually started is a real pain. Is there any way to correct this problem so that I can switch back to my X session when I switch TTYs?
Best Answer
Ah, the solution was relatively simple, instead of running
Running
Will prevent X from breaking when I switch TTYs.