Linux

I have a feeling this is a joke. Either way I'm not following sorry 😭

Each one is a virtual terminal and you can use them just like any other terminal. They exist because the easiest way to put some kind of a interactive display up is to just write text to a framebuffer and that’s exactly what your computer does when it boots and shows all that scrolling stuff. The different ones are just different framebuffers that the video card is asked to display when you push ctrl-alt-fnumber. You can add more or disable them altogether if you like.

Years ago my daily driver was a relatively tricked out compaq laptop and I used a combination of the highest mode set I could get, tmux and a bunch of curses based utilities to stay out of x for as much of the time as I could.

I mean, each vt had a slightly different colored background image, the text colors were configured, it was slick.

I used to treat them like multiple desktops.

With libcaca I was even able to watch movies on it without x.

I still use them when x breaks, which did happen last year to my surprise. If your adapter supports a vesa mode that’s appropriate to your monitor then you can use one with very fresh looking fonts and have everything look clean. Set you a background image and you’re off to the races with ncurses programs.

If your system is borked sometimes you can boot into those and fix it. I'm not yet good enough to utilize that myself though, I'm still fairly new to linux too.

Start by checking what windowing system you're using as its a fundamental part of problem solving. It's a little confusing how to do this, the top answer in this Stack exchange thread works well.

If you're running the latest KDE then you've almost certainly been moved to Wayland and that will be the source of your problems. Wayland and Nvidia drivers don't work well together, and KDE have defaulted to Wayland in the latest release. I have had very similar issues to you with the move to wayland and have not been able to fix them - they're too fundamental and depend on updates to wayland and/or Nvidia drivers.

I know you don't want a solution but there isn't one at the moment, so you'd be wasting your time. The solution is to log out, then on the log in screen select Plasma (X11) as your session and log in again.

Personally I have had to abandon KDE as I get a different set of problems in X11. I'm on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed so have little choice inrolling back to the previously functioning version of KDE - I'm using Cinnamon instead and contemplating switching to a different Linux distro, probably OpenSuSE Leap in favour of stability over cutting edge.

Meanwhile I have the latest KDE running on another device with AMD GPU without issue.

In terms of when it'll be fixed, there is a change being made to Wayland which will effect how it and the Nvidia drivers interact (something called Explicit sync). It's just been merged into wayland so presumably will appear downstream in the coming next few months in rolling distributions. There have been articles suggesting this is going to fix most problems but personally I think this is a little brave but fingers crossed.