I'm running Arch linux, I just installed kmscon and enabled the kmsconvt@tty2.service systemd service to have kmscon take over the second VT. It includes its own login manager that replaces getty. I then also login to the linux console on VT 3 and manually launch X from there (with just chromium in my .xinitrc).
kmscon has better handling for colors, fonts, etc. than the linux console; that's the only real reason I'm using it. On my laptop's builtin display I have no delay switching between any of the linux console/kmscon/X; when I plug in an external monitor I do get ~1-2 second delay switching from the linux console/kmscon -> X, no delay the other way.
There does appear to be some bug with switching from X -> kmscon, it just shows a black screen, but I've gotten used to switching X (VT 3) -> linux console (VT 1) -> kmscon (VT 2) which seems to work around that. There's also another bug where the Ctrl key seems to get stuck down in kmscon when switching to it sometimes, has only happened ~4 times in the last 8 months and I can fix it by just running `systemctl restart kmsconvt@tty2` and attaching to my tmux session again.
Since I'm not doing any frontend changes I don't ever really need to look at both my terminal and browser at the same time so haven't taken the time into seeing if I can have different VT displaying on different monitors. I prefer the portability of a laptop over having the most productive single location setup.
Latency was not at all a consideration, it was purely an exercise in how minimal a setup I could have. I spent a couple of weeks without having X installed and using command line browsers when I needed to, but using GitLab and JIRA through command line browsers was a real pain (and if I recall correctly some stuff was impossible).
A screenshot is difficult since it's multiple VTs and I don't think kmscon has any kind of builtin screenshot support. Just imagine a full-screen terminal with tmux, you hit Ctrl-Alt-F2, now it's a full screen browser; that's basically it.
One other thing I do have setup to make life a little easier are some little aliases syncing the X clipboard and tmux paste buffer so I can copy-paste between X and my terminal. And I have DISPLAY setup in the terminal so things like xdg-open and urlview can open stuff in my web browser.
kmscon has better handling for colors, fonts, etc. than the linux console; that's the only real reason I'm using it. On my laptop's builtin display I have no delay switching between any of the linux console/kmscon/X; when I plug in an external monitor I do get ~1-2 second delay switching from the linux console/kmscon -> X, no delay the other way.
There does appear to be some bug with switching from X -> kmscon, it just shows a black screen, but I've gotten used to switching X (VT 3) -> linux console (VT 1) -> kmscon (VT 2) which seems to work around that. There's also another bug where the Ctrl key seems to get stuck down in kmscon when switching to it sometimes, has only happened ~4 times in the last 8 months and I can fix it by just running `systemctl restart kmsconvt@tty2` and attaching to my tmux session again.
Since I'm not doing any frontend changes I don't ever really need to look at both my terminal and browser at the same time so haven't taken the time into seeing if I can have different VT displaying on different monitors. I prefer the portability of a laptop over having the most productive single location setup.
Latency was not at all a consideration, it was purely an exercise in how minimal a setup I could have. I spent a couple of weeks without having X installed and using command line browsers when I needed to, but using GitLab and JIRA through command line browsers was a real pain (and if I recall correctly some stuff was impossible).
A screenshot is difficult since it's multiple VTs and I don't think kmscon has any kind of builtin screenshot support. Just imagine a full-screen terminal with tmux, you hit Ctrl-Alt-F2, now it's a full screen browser; that's basically it.
One other thing I do have setup to make life a little easier are some little aliases syncing the X clipboard and tmux paste buffer so I can copy-paste between X and my terminal. And I have DISPLAY setup in the terminal so things like xdg-open and urlview can open stuff in my web browser.