To (perhaps) answer my own question: Looks like PureOS has systemd
, and so the way to tell the system to boot in non-graphical mode is^1:
sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target
(as opposed to the current default of graphical.target
)
Tested: this does, indeed work. Laptop boots to text-only login prompt.
Observation: the systemctl
command above just sets a symlink in /lib/systemd/system/
, and, if you look in that directory, there are all sorts of interesting .target
files in there, including symlinks for the various runlevels. I don’t know enough about using systemd
to grok the details, but I reckon you could do other interesting things with this.
Any alternatives, or considerations I’m missing, do let me know. 