# 1. What Alloy is

Alloy is a curated desktop built on Fedora's atomic base. The pieces:

- **Fedora bootc as the base.** The operating system is a container image. It
  is not modified in place; a new version is staged and swapped at boot, and
  the previous one stays on disk to roll back to.
- **sway as the compositor.** i3-style manual tiling on Wayland. Workspaces,
  splits, tabs, and stacks. No scrolling columns, no animation.
- **A terminal-first stack.** shop for the terminal, nushell for the shell,
  helix for the editor, yazi for files, bottom for processes, zathura for PDFs,
  imv for images, mpv for video.
- **One authored program, the `alloy` console.** Network, audio, displays,
  packages, settings, sync, and the installer, all as terminal views sharing
  one keymap and one palette.

Alloy adopts everything graphical it needs (swaylock, mako, swaybar, swayosd)
and authors nothing that a terminal can serve.

## Who it is for

Developers and keyboard-driven users who prefer configuring once to configuring
often, and who are comfortable in a terminal. Alloy assumes you would rather
read one page about how the system is put together than click through settings
looking for a checkbox.

It is not a gaming distro, not a GNOME spin, and not a fork of Universal Blue's
images.

## What is different from a normal Linux desktop

Three things surprise people, in roughly this order.

**You cannot `dnf install` into the running system.** The root filesystem is
read only. Software goes to one of three places instead, and chapter 7 is about
choosing between them.

**There is no graphical settings app.** Settings live in `alloy settings` and
the other console verbs. Anything the console does not cover is a config file
under `~/.config`, and `alloy settings` can edit most of those too.

**Your machine is meant to be disposable.** The interesting state is your files
and your identity, both of which can follow you to the next install. Chapter 12
covers the two enrollments that make that true.

## What Alloy deliberately does not have

- No emoji font, and no fallback that draws them. Emoji in a web page render as
  missing glyphs.
- No screen recorder. The picked tool is not packaged for Fedora yet.
- No scanner support. Printing is driverless only (chapter 13).
- No automatic updates of any kind.
- No graphical file manager, launcher, or editor. Each has a terminal answer.

These are positions, not omissions waiting to be fixed. Where one turns out to
be wrong, it changes in a release rather than in a preference toggle.