[spl757]

I'm a proverbial greybeard and Ctrl+Alt+F7 used to just be what you did to get back to your desktop GUI.

FWIW, right now I'm typing this from Ubuntu Studio 24.04 and it's Ctrl+Alt+F2 to get back to the GUI. Ctrl+Alt+F1 shows you the bootup output scroll, +F3 to +F6 will give you a login prompt to drop into a shell. +F7 to +F12 just give me a blinking cursor un the upper right corner of the display.

I'm kinda surprised only +F3 to +F6 give me a shell login. Three isn't that many.

[numpad0]

I think Ctrl+Alt+F1-F7 are Kernel provided Virtual Console things, and technically they can be connected to different things, I think like VC 5 -> /dev/tty5 -> a thread in /sbin/getty? The VC 7 used to be often opened up for X, but Ubuntu moved X to VC 1 at some point. I guess it's VC 2 now.

[SubiculumCode]

I do think it might be a more recent change related to a)gnome display manager, and b)systemd.