base: move to Fedora 43, add initial-setup for first-boot accounts
The F42 base reached end of support (its last kernel is dated
2026-05-08), which surfaced as an end-of-support error on the installed
system. Bumps the base and dnf's releasever pin to 43.
Not 44: satty, swww, zellij, starship, bottom, swayosd, and
bibata-cursor-theme have no F44 builds yet. Terra and all three COPRs
enable fine on 44, they just have not rebuilt. Revisit when they do.
The full package set was verified to depsolve on 43 (422 packages, no
unmatched names).
The other half is the reason the FW12 install had no way in. The bootc
Anaconda flow presents no user-creation spoke, so an install completed
with root locked, greeter set to nologin, and no loginable account at
all. initial-setup fixes that: it prompts for account creation on first
boot and disables itself once setup succeeds. Ordering is free, since
greetd carries Alias=display-manager.service and initial-setup declares
Before=display-manager.service and Before=getty-pre.target.
initial-setup-gui is deliberately not installed. Without the GUI binary
run-initial-setup takes the TUI branch even though default.target is
graphical.target, which is what a TUI-first distro wants.
The tty1 drop-in is load-bearing, not cosmetic. Fedora's unit sets
TTYPath=/dev/tty7 and run-initial-setup contains no chvt, so the prompt
would render to a VT nobody is watching and the machine would look hung
on a blank screen.
build/alloy-0.0.yaml stays the fedora-42 anaconda set: bib ships no
fedora-43.yaml, and the 42 set depsolves clean on 43 (894 packages).
Recorded in its header so the next bump rechecks instead of assuming.
Not verified on hardware. The first-boot path in particular is reasoned
from the unit file and the launcher script, not observed.
Co-Authored-By
Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Author: Max Johnson <me@maxj.phd> · 2026-07-19 17:10 UTC