What you expected sounds more like what nim offers.

I use futhark runes for my machines and set an ASCII representation of the rune symbol as the /etc/{issue,motd}

Loaded quake on all the computers in a classroom. Which were conveniently arranged to make it impossible for a teacher to see all screens at once. And with no effort we were able to play multi-player matches basically every class. A substitute even joined in one time.

Arch on my laptop and nixos on my server.