> Usually I'm not a fan of overriding user settings (in this case the kernel > command line) but in this case it's OK since the rest of the system at least > can be sure that we have UTF-8 VTs.
Aha, the gnu/services/base.scm tries to make sure that an UTF-8 aware unicode font is already loaded before switching the tty to UTF-8. We would have to set default_utf8 earlier (before even the vt is activated), otherwise the setting wouldn't be copied to the new terminal.
