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# 1. What Alloy is |
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Alloy is a curated desktop built on Fedora's atomic base. The pieces: |
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- **Fedora bootc as the base.** The operating system is a container image. It |
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is not modified in place; a new version is staged and swapped at boot, and |
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the previous one stays on disk to roll back to. |
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- **sway as the compositor.** i3-style manual tiling on Wayland. Workspaces, |
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splits, tabs, and stacks. No scrolling columns, no animation. |
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- **A terminal-first stack.** shop for the terminal, nushell for the shell, |
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helix for the editor, yazi for files, bottom for processes, zathura for PDFs, |
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imv for images, mpv for video. |
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- **One authored program, the `alloy` console.** Network, audio, displays, |
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packages, settings, sync, and the installer, all as terminal views sharing |
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one keymap and one palette. |
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Alloy adopts everything graphical it needs (swaylock, mako, swaybar, swayosd) |
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and authors nothing that a terminal can serve. |
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## Who it is for |
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Developers and keyboard-driven users who prefer configuring once to configuring |
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often, and who are comfortable in a terminal. Alloy assumes you would rather |
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read one page about how the system is put together than click through settings |
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looking for a checkbox. |
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It is not a gaming distro, not a GNOME spin, and not a fork of Universal Blue's |
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images. |
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## What is different from a normal Linux desktop |
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Three things surprise people, in roughly this order. |
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**You cannot `dnf install` into the running system.** The root filesystem is |
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read only. Software goes to one of three places instead, and chapter 7 is about |
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choosing between them. |
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**There is no graphical settings app.** Settings live in `alloy settings` and |
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the other console verbs. Anything the console does not cover is a config file |
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under `~/.config`, and `alloy settings` can edit most of those too. |
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**Your machine is meant to be disposable.** The interesting state is your files |
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and your identity, both of which can follow you to the next install. Chapter 12 |
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covers the two enrollments that make that true. |
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## What Alloy deliberately does not have |
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- No emoji font, and no fallback that draws them. Emoji in a web page render as |
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missing glyphs. |
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- No screen recorder. The picked tool is not packaged for Fedora yet. |
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- No scanner support. Printing is driverless only (chapter 13). |
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- No automatic updates of any kind. |
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- No graphical file manager, launcher, or editor. Each has a terminal answer. |
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These are positions, not omissions waiting to be fixed. Where one turns out to |
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be wrong, it changes in a release rather than in a preference toggle. |
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