Arcan 0.6.1 Released With More Features Added To This Open-Source Display Stack

[8r34k0u7_57y13]

I agree! With every Arcan article, I'm sad that everyone went the Wayland route rather than the Arcan route.

Don't be sad.

PulseAudio as software suck, but it's nice as a protocol.
Wayland is 'just a protocol' but all the current implementations suck.

I see Arcan as analogous to PipeWire, it's the future based on the standards and protocols of today so we don't have to reinvent the wheel, again.

[bple2137]

Despite the work nvidia did with adding support for gbm, arcan still doesn't work properly with nvidia; it just freezes at startup. Hopefully nvidia will have proper gbm support one day.

Not only that. As of today, at least for me NVIDIA do not function properly with any Wayland compositor I've tried (Mutter, KWin, Sway, Weston). Sway was the closest to sort of working, though there was some glitches and flickering and the cursor wasn't visible (but when I tried some games on Xwayland, they were generally servicable).

[dec05eba]

Despite the work nvidia did with adding support for gbm, arcan still doesn't work properly with nvidia; it just freezes at startup. Hopefully nvidia will have proper gbm support one day.

[ssokolow]

I agree! With every Arcan article, I'm sad that everyone went the Wayland route rather than the Arcan route.

On the plus side, Wayland is "just a protocol" and provides a much less "get your fingers into the guts of things" interface for applications than X11, so, unlike historical competitors to X11, it should be possible to easily transplant the Wayland application ecosystem onto Arcan down the line.

[tuxd3v]

I agree! With every Arcan article, I'm sad that everyone went the Wayland route rather than the Arcan route.

Me too.

[Vistaus]

Really excited for Arcan. The way it'sg going it might actually be a viable replacement for Xorg eventually. The dev has been working on it for a few years and doesn't seem to plan on abandoning it any time soon. Lua as an extension language is a wise choice. I also like that it's trying to be a viable modern desktop display stack instead of a repurposed in vehicle infotainment display system.

I agree! With every Arcan article, I'm sad that everyone went the Wayland route rather than the Arcan route.

[bple2137]

I'm really curious where will it go. In next few years we could possibly see that Wayland is too hard to maintain and maybe it's not that bad idea to build some new solutions.

It's backwards compatible with X and Wayland, as far as I remember it can sandbox Xwayland instances - so problems like security and some other limitations can go away (multi DPI setups?), it's focused on modern tech, gives good amount of elasticity, brings some sort of framework that could be shared between UI implementations and also looks like it's very snappy. Just the timing is bad as there's a lot of push for Wayland. Also I read some time ago that it's not intended to bring traditional desktop UI on Arcan, but rather some weird experimental ones, but I can't see why something familiar couldn't be built on top of Arcan. Another thing is that the project can also never aim regular desktop usage.

[binarybanana]

Really excited for Arcan. The way it'sg going it might actually be a viable replacement for Xorg eventually. The dev has been working on it for a few years and doesn't seem to plan on abandoning it any time soon. Lua as an extension language is a wise choice. I also like that it's trying to be a viable modern desktop display stack instead of a repurposed in vehicle infotainment display system.

[Vistaus]

I always had the impression that it was more like a compositor and would work on top of Xorg and Wayland.

Now I am not so sure

It is not. It's a completely separate display stack, like how Xorg is completely separate.

[jonix]

What's this? Why have I never heard of it? Is it an alternative to X and Wayland? How well does it work in comparison to wayland?

I always had the impression that it was more like a compositor and would work on top of Xorg and Wayland.

Now I am not so sure