Wanted to share an anecdote (I hope that’s OK). I jumped to Linux on my gaming pc last August (Bazzite) and I’ve been having a blast. Almost everything works either out of the box or with a minor tweak (the tweak being updating Proton). But I am the sole linux user in my D&D/gaming group, so obviously this is the source of some of our banter.
Last night, we decided to play some Valheim. Bought it before switching to Linux and never tried it, so steam had to install some compatibilty stuff. But once everything was installed, it too worked like a charm (surprise surprise). We were having fun, sailing around on our crappy raft mighty longship and striking a nice pose while doing so. I decided to take a screenshot, but didn’t know if there was a keybind to disable the HUD, so I asked the two more experienced Valheimers with whom I was playing. Neither of them knew it by heart, but one of them looked it up. He said: “It should be Ctrl + F3”. I tried it and it didn’t work for me, but it did for him. “Wow, imagine playing on linux where nothing works” our other friend chimed in (jokely, don’t worry). Our first, more helpful friend said: “Maybe try Ctrl + Alt + F3?” So I did. Then, my whole computer froze, just as we landed on the edge of a dark forest with our raft. I thought: Oh fuck what did I do this time. Pressing again didn’t help, but after about 20/30 seconds, I was greeted with a shell login. Now I could hear my friends and the game in the background again, and they could hear me, but all I saw was a shell. I decided to log in, and still only got a shell. So, as my friends were frantically fighting a skeleton, I was searching for what on earth happened, and, more importantly, how to fix it.
Thankfully, I wasn’t the first idiot to start pressing random buttons on their Linux system, and someone had this exact issue years back as well. I had a quick read, and learned that apparently the Ctrl + Alt + Fx buttons switch between virtual terminals. The post on the Ubuntu forums mentioned needing to switch to terminal 7 (Ctrl + Alt + F7), which also didn’t work. But trying the other buttons, I found that the desktop environment is on terminal 2 (at least on Bazzite/Fedora).
And the funny thing here is that, even though I was essentially gone for a full minute, maybe a minute and a half, my character was fine, my Linux naysayer friend had died to a skeleton, and I had learned something new about our great OS :)
TTY’s are one of those thing that aren’t as often required these days as they used to be, but - and trust me on this - should you ever encounter one of the increasingly rare situations where you really need them, you’ll suddenly be very, very glad they exist.
Oh I not bashing on the feature, don’t worry. I was just very surprised when my computer seemed to freeze XD.
Out of curiousity, what kind of use cases do/did they have?
When your entire desktop environment freezes, on Windows you’d have to do a hard shutdown, risking data loss or corruption.
On Linux you switch to another TTY, kill the process that’s locking up everything, and go back to work.Troubleshooting and fixing your system when your desktop environment is broken
You don’t need a desktop for a server. A local TTY allows the same stuff as connecting over SSH but you can do whatever you need to bring up the network. The drawback is having to go to the data centre…
So what was the right shortcut for the screenshot in the end?
For Steam it is F12, for the OS it is just Print Screen.
I recommend the latter since you can also do a partial screenshot, draw on it and it gets saved in your Pictures folder automatically.
Hah, I did that too in my first weeks with linux x3… I think I wanted to hit alt + f4, but for some reason I also hit ctrl with it… had a mild heart attack when my screen just went to CLI, but I figured it out :3
Sums up my experience here pretty well too XD
i‘m glad you learned about how to switch tty! now this is a very rare situation, but if you log into your computer, then switch to some tty, log in there too, do things, lock it, and leave the computer, the other tty is still unlocked because you need to lock both the tty you logged into.
i know this is a super rare/ hypothetical situation, but i think you should know.That is indeed good to be aware of, thank you!
Traditionally virtual tty 1 through 6 were text terminal. So X used the 7th, that’s why some older forums tells you to go there.
Nowadays, the graphical session manager will spawn on vtty 1, and sessions will dynamically use the others. So on a mostly single user computer, Ctrl+alt+F2 is likely to work. With multiple users, you can actually switch users or come back to the session manager this way.
If you switch to an unused vtty, systemd will spawn a text login prompt. And when you login, some logind dark magic makes the system realize your are entitled to hear the audio output of your application still running on your graphical session.
Valheim uses proton? I’m pretty sure it ran natively a few years back.
Vital feature.
Just in case your game fogot to put in a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key
Valheim runs natively on linux. No need to install compatability layers. Can also probably use steams screenshot button or whatever your desktop enviroment uses.
I’m part-way through Valheim right now. Single-player on Windows, I’m gonna change to Linux in a few weeks I think.
“Jokingly, don’t worry” come on man you’re not walking on egg shells just by saying something negative
