[BRLTTY] is it safe to upgrade to fedora 45?

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Halim Sahin via BRLTTY on 2026/10/27 at 16:35 +0100]

Hi:

>Does brltty work with kmscon in fedora 45?

No, it doesn't. At least, I'm unaware of any work that has been done, is being done, or is planneed for this. That being said, all is not lost!

Th old method - fbcon - is still built into the Fedora 45 kernel and, as near as I can tell, will continue to be retained for some time to come. Also, it's possible to revert a Fedora 45 system back to using fbcon. I dn't think, however, that it's possible to tell dnf system-upgrade to tell Fedora 45 to initially boot to an fbco-configured system. I believe, therefore, that reverting it to fbcon will require sighted assistance. :-(

I don't want to give specific commands because I myself haven't yet verified the steps to revert to fbcon. The high-level overview, however, is as follows. It's all controlled via systemctl commands: Disable kmscon so tat rebooting won't start it. Mask kmscon so that something else won't automatically start it. Enable fbcon - which really means enable getty - so that it'll be started during boot.

There's been discussion about no one wanting to support the Linux console anymore. I don't think that's fair. They do! The problem is that fbcon is built into the kernel. Enhancements to it, therefore, mean potential bugs, and a bug means a kernel crash. That's why they don't like the current (old) way, i.e. enhancing the Linux console is just too risky. Migrating to kmscon, however, means that a failure just crashes the single VT that it occurs on, with systemd then automatically restarting it.

In fact, kmscon already actually does contain enhancements. One example is that scrollback is back. Another is that font resizing is supported. Also, while we brltty users have had full Unicode support for a few years, sighted users haven't - they've always been limited to a maximum of 512 Unicode characters. When using kmscon, however, visual users get full Unicode support.

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