Felix Miata:
Indeed. It's what I had in mind when I responded. I'll give one guess where it came from.....
Time's up. Yes, systemd. Who couldn't have guessed. It imposed a notion that I first noticed.... (wish to guess where?)
Yup, on Fedora, home of Leonard P, under the aegis of RedHat, and Gnome.
....that X somehow belongs on tty1 instead of tty7.
This is quite wrong. Neither systemd nor Lennart Poettering
imposed such a notion. The RedHat people had the idea of moving
the X server to tty1 in 2008. It wasn't Lennart
Poettering's idea, as can be seen by reading the list of people on
the Fedora doco of the idea, and it pre-dates systemd's very
invention by two years. It was motivated by reducing
mode-change flicker during the boot process, by avoiding KVT
switching, and at the time Fedora was using upstart. Ironically,
the idea was imposed upon systemd and Lennart
Poettering, which had to adjust to accommodate it.
The problem with the Bourne Again shell package's clear_console
is KVT switching, and similarly eliminating KVT
switching fixes it (as I explained back in 2015, when I
published a replacement clear_console
that did not do KVT switching). There is nothing special about tty1
here; and this is everything to do with a Bourne Again shell
package tool that uses a bodge to clear KVTs, and nothing to do
with systemd.