Bizarre to think that at the time nobody stopped Oracle from picking up Ksplice (they offered rebootless security patches for all the larger distros back in what, 2009?). I really loved their service because it meant I could keep my half million or so terminals in gnu screen open for months.

(Also, their blog was great - see eg this really scary proof-of-concept of what you can do when you know how to live-patch a kernel https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/hosting_backdoors_in_... )

Dare I ask how having half a million terminals open in screen is useful in any way?

Ok, not really half a million. Maybe 20 or so :) That's still a lot of state to lose for a kernel-upgrade reboot.

I guess it's a style of working. If you need to ask, that probably means you're not the kind of person who cares about the advanced tab-grouping features in firefox either, and you probably also never have so many different paper files open on your desk that you can't find space for your laptop? I'm not sure I can explain, and certainly not defend it - you might call it "organised chaos" :)

In any case, it's all state, and it doesn't all fit in your head. And a reboot wipes it out!

Do you know of any decent way to save the layout / history of each term window? Or more generally, the state of X desktop, to be able to reload later / have several "workspaces" set up for different sets of tasks?