First Boot

Here's what happens when BruceOS boots for the first time.

Desktop

GDM starts and auto-logs in as liveuser (on the live ISO) or your created user (on an installed system). No login screen on live boot.

You land on a GNOME desktop with:

• WhiteSur dark theme applied to GTK, icons, and window decorations (if network was available during build; falls back to Adwaita otherwise)
• Dash to Dock at the bottom of the screen, fixed position
• Window buttons on the left side (close, minimize, maximize) -- Mac-style layout
• Favorite apps in the dock: Files, Ghostty, Firefox, Software

The default wallpaper is GNOME's stock wallpaper. A BruceOS wallpaper is planned.

Terminal

Open Ghostty from the dock or press `Ctrl+`` for the dropdown terminal.

You get:

• Fish shell with autocomplete and syntax highlighting. No plugins needed.
• Starship prompt showing your current directory, git branch, and git status. Nothing else.
• Catppuccin Mocha color scheme with JetBrains Mono at 13pt.

The following aliases are pre-configured:

ls  → eza --icons
ll  → eza -la --icons
cat → bat --paging=never
tree → eza --tree --icons

Run fastfetch to see your system info.

Zellij

Start a multiplexed terminal session with:

zellij

Navigation uses Alt+hjkl (vim-style). Fish is the default shell inside Zellij panes. Pane frames are disabled for a clean look.

What's not there yet

The following features are planned but not available on first boot today:

bruce-setup TUI. A first-boot configuration wizard that handles profile selection, shell preference, theme customization, and AI model downloads. Coming soon.

AI assistant. Ollama and the GTK4 chat application are not yet pre-installed. The model download and configuration will be handled by bruce-setup.

Gaming stack. Steam, Proton-GE, and related tools are not included in the base profile yet.

Creative tools. Blender, GIMP, Krita, and DaVinci Resolve are planned for the VFX profile.

System details

A few things the kickstart configures under the hood:

• Kernel: CachyOS BORE scheduler (falls back to stock Fedora kernel if COPR was unavailable)
• GPU drivers: Auto-detected during build. NVIDIA gets proprietary drivers, AMD and Intel use the kernel drivers.
• ZRAM swap: Enabled, sized to half your RAM, compressed with zstd
• vm.max_map_count: Set to 1048576 (required by many games and large applications)
• vm.swappiness: Set to 10 (prefers keeping data in RAM)
• SELinux: Enforcing
• Firewall: Enabled with SSH allowed
• Flatpak: Flathub remote added for installing additional applications
• Podman and Distrobox: Installed for running containers and alternate Linux environments

Next steps

• Terminal reference -- full configuration details for Ghostty, Fish, Starship, and Zellij
• Package list -- everything that's installed
• Kickstart reference -- how the system is built