The Hat Tips Both Ways

Fedora 45's feature list reads like a renovation plan — new console, new desktop, verifiable packages, a panic screen with manners. But look at the change proposals closely and a pattern emerges: nearly every headline feature is somebody else's deprecation. This article collects the three fights that shaped F45 before it shipped — the console, the users it leaves behind, and the two-front war over what x86 even means anymore.

The console that needs a working system

The pitch for KMSCON is honest and mostly correct: fbcon, the kernel's built-in text console, is unmaintained, lost scrolling to a CVE, can't resize fonts on HiDPI screens, and every crash inside it is a kernel panic. A userspace console gets you real Unicode, your desktop keyboard layout, scrollback, and fonts that don't look like they were rendered in 1994.^[1]

The counterargument writes itself in the word "userspace." The virtual console is the debugging surface of last resort — the thing you fall back to when the system is already broken. A console that needs libdrm, mesa, and DRM master negotiation is a console that can join the outage instead of reporting it. Testers surfaced the rough edges quickly: kmscon-launch-gui scripts that fail to start graphical sessions, tty now reporting /dev/pts/N instead of /dev/tty1 — quietly breaking any script that checked — no sixel graphics, and no clean path for the niche that launched SDL apps and games straight off the console.^[2]

Fedora's answer is a fallback: kmscon fails → getty/fbcon. Which is reasonable — until you read the same proposal's stated long-term goal: deprecating fbcon/fbdev emulation in the kernel entirely. The fallback is a bridge scheduled for demolition.^[3]

"Just use fbcon" — while planning to delete fbcon

The sharpest version of that problem isn't script breakage — it's people. Linux's blind users navigate the console through speakup and BRLTTY, and both bind to the kernel console that KMSCON replaces. Raised in the Fedora discussion thread, the response amounted to: they can keep using fbcon.^[4]

That answer has a shelf life. fbcon is the thing the proposal wants gone. When it goes, the accessibility story becomes "wait for a screen reader to be rebuilt inside kmscon" — a promise, not a plan. To be fair to the engineers: console accessibility at the kernel level has been frozen since the 1990s, and somebody eventually has to rebuild it. But "eventually" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and the users who depend on the oldest interface in the stack are being asked to absorb the risk on faith.^[5]

The distros that exist because this problem is real

Here is the part that reframes the whole KMSCON debate: an entire ecosystem of operating systems exists solely because mainstream Linux keeps breaking blind users' access. These are not hobbies. They are maintained, engineered distributions whose entire purpose is to guarantee that the console speaks — and their collective existence is the strongest possible evidence that "keep using fbcon" is not an answer, it's a delegation.

Accessible-Coconut

Accessible-Coconut (AC), from India's Zendalona project, is an explicitly eyes-free desktop built on Ubuntu MATE and Debian foundations — and its design philosophy is the direct inverse of Fedora's. Where F45 says "accessibility tooling will catch up," AC disables standard background preloads and updates to guarantee absolute compatibility with specialized accessibility software. Nothing breaks because nothing is allowed to change underneath the user.^[6]

Its feature set reads like a spec sheet for what "accessible" actually means when taken seriously: pre-configured speech dispatchers (espeak-ng, flite, RHVoice), an automatic text-to-speech console screen reader, six-key Braille input in Perkins Brailler mode, an integrated DAISY talking-book player, and an OCR utility for reading scanned text aloud.^[7]

Stormux

Stormux goes lower still — an Arch and Arch Linux ARM distribution for x86_64 PCs and single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi, engineered around "accessible pathways at the lowest levels of the OS." Its console is driven by the Fenrir screen reader — a userspace console screen reader that, pointedly, bypasses legacy kernel fbcon dependencies entirely. Fenrir is precisely the class of tooling the KMSCON transition needs and doesn't yet have. Stormux forces accessibility from the very first boot: no sighted person required to enable it.^[8]

Slint

Slint — Slackware-based, polyglot, famously stable — was re-engineered from the ground up alongside blind testers to attack the barrier nobody talks about: installation. Every mainstream "accessible" OS still assumes a sighted person does the install. Slint's installer talks — speech feedback, or immediate Braille output the moment a refreshable Braille device is plugged in. And it lets the user switch fluidly between an accessible console mode (Speakup) and graphical mode (Orca) without rebooting — exactly the console/GUI bridge that F45's transition fumbles.^[9]

Vojtux

Vojtux is the most instructive of all: an unofficial Fedora-based distribution built by a blind software engineer, on Fedora itself — because he personally experiences every pain point of mainstream OS changes. It forces Orca to run instantly at the login screen, pre-configures Qt accessibility flags system-wide, and ships custom scripts to toggle monitor output off entirely — sighted colleagues' displays are a privacy leak, not a feature. The existence of a Fedora respin built specifically to survive Fedora's own churn is the gentlest possible indictment of the direction.^[10]

The pioneers: Adriane Knoppix, Vinux, Sonar

And the lineage runs deep. Adriane Knoppix — the text-based, menu-driven live interface — was built by Knoppix founder Klaus Knopper for his blind wife: a completely non-visual computer bootable from a live CD, years before "accessibility" was a project roadmap item. Vinux (Ubuntu-based) and Sonar (Manjaro-based) are no longer maintained, but they are the blueprints every modern accessible distro descends from — they proved the principle this whole section rests on: speech synthesis and magnification must be baked into the ISO, not installed post-facto.^[11]

When Fedora's answer to blind users is "keep using the old console," it is answering a question that entire distributions already exist to answer differently. The old console's demolition date is the day those distros — and the people who need them — become the migration's real test.

The x86 two-front war

And then there's the fight Fedora is having in both directions at once.

In one trench: the proposal to drop i686 multilib — 32-bit x86 package support, the load-bearing dependency of Wine, Steam's back catalog, and the entire Bazzite gaming distro — was withdrawn after immediate, heavy backlash. Nobody argues 32-bit x86 has a future; the argument is about who maintains a thing nobody wants to own but everybody still uses. The reprieve postponed the question rather than answering it.^[12]

In the opposite trench: FESCo rejected the x86-64-v3 optimized-package proposal for F45 — a separate repo of packages compiled with AVX2/BMI2/FMA, covering essentially every Intel/AMD CPU of the last decade — pending more performance data. RHEL 10 already requires v3 as baseline; Microsoft reportedly wanted it for Azure Linux. The community that won't drop 32-bit support also won't accept faster builds for decade-old hardware. Fedora is simultaneously accused of abandoning old x86 and of refusing to modernize it — and both accusations are true, depending which trench you're standing in.^[13]

The era of the opening bid

The backdrop matters: this is the release cycle where someone proposed swapping X.Org for the Xlibre fork (vetoed within days) and another discussion floated replacing LibreOffice with Collabora Office. The Fedora Changes process has quietly become a negotiation format — proposals arrive as opening bids, communities push back, and what ships is whatever survives the argument. F45's real novelty isn't KMSCON or reproducible builds; it's that the argument itself is now part of the release notes.^[14]

The slip to 27 October, in that light, is almost fitting: Fedora 45 doesn't ship when the calendar says so — it ships when the blockers clear and the arguments pause. The hat tips both ways.

See also

• Fedora 45 — the release itself: features, dates, the NO-GO
• Why Debian Is Still King — the distribution that solves this by changing nothing
• The blind-friendly cluster: Accessible-Coconut · Stormux · Slint · Vojtux · Adriane Knoppix · Vinux · Sonar
• History of Programming