Unexpected Ubuntu reboot • Henry Bonjour

This morning, I rebooted my ten-year-old Ubuntu laptop, which I recently revived for a side project. The problem is, I wasn’t expecting that at all.

All I wanted to do was run a test in IntelliJ using a keyboard shortcut. On MacOS, I use Ctrl + Shift + R. This shortcut is slightly different on Linux: Ctrl + Shift + F10.

So, I typed Ctrl + Alt + F10.

Wait.

No.

Too late. A blinking cursor appeared in an empty terminal. Meet virtual consoles:

Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Fn (or just Alt+Fn when not in X11, the GUI) switches to the nth virtual console (ttyn).

Since I had never used these shortcuts before, I waited until my laptop rebooted a few seconds later (though I don’t know why it did). You can return to the GUI by pressing Ctrl + Alt + F7.