Arcan scratches the same kind of itch that nix does for me but for the gnu/linux graphics stack and everything that has to interact with it.
ingenieroariel 1 hours ago [-]
I like Nix as well, you can use this one liner in OSX or Linux to try out arcan/durden/cat9, as it matures you can expect arcan applications to be made available the way html pages/apps and this kind of nix derivation would let you run the "browser":
I remain confused by Arcan, even having looked into it a few times over the years.
Ultimately it appears to be software with more fans than productive users.
somat 13 minutes ago [-]
In that regard it's the plan9 of display servers.
I love the idea of arcan, I like how as a counter point to waylands "X went to hard, the display server should be a dynamically linked shared object" there is one solitary guy doing his own thing saying "X did not go hard enough we need an even more seamless, recursive solution to move our display between different devices" and doing amazing work on this problem.
But just like plan9 I have a hard time actually doing anything with it. Achingly beautiful software, but just a little to different and obscure. And I say that as an OpenBSD daily driver, where apparently I thrive on the pain that comes from using an obscure system.
But I am currently back on the plan9 kick, seeing if I can get it to stick this time. I may give arcan another try as well.
ux266478 53 minutes ago [-]
What are you confused by?
> Ultimately it appears to be software with more fans than productive users.
Correct. You can swing productive usage of Durden and the rest of the kit in its current state, but it's still an experimental piece of software under active research and development. As it stands, it's more attractive to daily drive xorg as a default while keeping arcan around to hack on and experiment with.
It's been rapidly closing the gap towards usability over the last few development cycles. I can speak for myself as tentatively waiting for 1.0 before abandoning xorg totally, which is at least a few years away.
idle_zealot 51 minutes ago [-]
Despite having read about it multiple times I still don't feel like I know what it is. My best guess is that it's an operating system, minus the kernel? But also it can be used as a GTK/Qt type interface layer? Or it can be used to replace X/Wayland? So like, a super modular operating system? And now I guess it's also a web browser, or a generalization of web-browser-like things that may or may not actually be compatible with the traditional web?
ux266478 45 minutes ago [-]
You're close! I'd recommend checking out this blog post which frames it as such and goes into motivations and how the architecture ends up panning out at a high level:
nix run --impure 'git+https://codeberg.org/ingenieroariel/arcan?ref=nix-flake-buil...'
Ultimately it appears to be software with more fans than productive users.
I love the idea of arcan, I like how as a counter point to waylands "X went to hard, the display server should be a dynamically linked shared object" there is one solitary guy doing his own thing saying "X did not go hard enough we need an even more seamless, recursive solution to move our display between different devices" and doing amazing work on this problem.
But just like plan9 I have a hard time actually doing anything with it. Achingly beautiful software, but just a little to different and obscure. And I say that as an OpenBSD daily driver, where apparently I thrive on the pain that comes from using an obscure system.
But I am currently back on the plan9 kick, seeing if I can get it to stick this time. I may give arcan another try as well.
> Ultimately it appears to be software with more fans than productive users.
Correct. You can swing productive usage of Durden and the rest of the kit in its current state, but it's still an experimental piece of software under active research and development. As it stands, it's more attractive to daily drive xorg as a default while keeping arcan around to hack on and experiment with.
It's been rapidly closing the gap towards usability over the last few development cycles. I can speak for myself as tentatively waiting for 1.0 before abandoning xorg totally, which is at least a few years away.
https://arcan-fe.com/2021/09/20/arcan-as-operating-system-de...