Post #13 has the best or more correct answer according to your replies. Apart from the zero value.

While reading this thread I was thinking about the tty's of my distro, Debian. I am talking about the ones you get to when pressing Ctrl+Alt+(1-6). If I remember well when I was reading about them, some distros use less than 7 and could place the GUI environment on a different terminal than seven.
Does anyone uses those while running a desktop environment? (I only remember using those once/twice)

And I have a question related to this, I'll post it here because I don't want to start another thread for it.
My tty1 is "locked". I am not presented with a login screen, rather I see the end of the boot process and there is no reaction to the keyboard when I get there. Is this normal (i think it shouldn't be) or should I be worried about my installation, which is working fine and without any problems that I know of. The last two lines of tty1:
[ OK ] Started Simple Desktop Display Manager.
Starting Hostname Service...

With no login available on VT1, it is being used to start your GUI session.

Most distros will use VT7 for the GUI, but some use VT5.

Yes, I'll use a VT whilst using a GUI, as I get a full screen command line program instantly, with just a Ctrl+Alt+F2, or whichever I've logged into, but then again, I'm happy working at the command line anyway.

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Just add to my previous comment... I don't keep applications open if not actively using them. No need. Apps start up is almost instantaneously... Need a terminal? Click, bam, there it is... Oh, Geany, click, there it is with all previous files open ready for editing... So desktop is usually 'clean' other than Thunderbird e-mail client which is always up. Simple.

The "terminal" application on my Mac has the very nice feature of being able to open new terminal sessions in tabs, much like a web browser.

One Linux feature that I do miss is the ability to switch out of the GUI environment and into a real "character mode terminal session" and back again, with a simple keyboard sequence. So far as I know, MacOS (Unix) has never offered that.

Window manager has 3 workspaces. Plenty of room for running mocp ,sensors, stuff like cd, cp, mv, ls
Out of the way or stacked.

And what's wrong with the other answers?

Nothing, everyone is using what they need. Maybe post #2 was right saying that this is pointless.

Coming back to this one, I reinstalled last night and tty1 is normal. However, I cannot check F11 and F12, my keyboard only has up to an F10.

Depends. Today, the terminal count is rather low. Tomorrow? Who knows?

I've been making tweaks to a couple of web servers -- 'prod' and 'test' -- so I have ssh connections to each of those systems with several terminals opened for editing config files, tailing logs, etc. A bunch of terminals might be opened simultaneously if I'm mucking around with DNS and proxy server configs. My 'Editing' KDE activity is normally running at least one terminal to run Emacs and make while I'm updating documentation. My 'Audio' activity might have a terminal window open. I probably have more terminal windows opened than many might as I'm not keen on tabs and have pretty much gone "old school" and began using xterm (no tabs) more than any other terminal emulator.