Game Engine Powered Arcan Display Server With Durden Desktop Updated

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Game Engine Powered Arcan Display Server With Durden Desktop Updated

Arcan, the open-source display server powered by a game engine, is out with a new release. Its Durden desktop environment has also been updated...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Arcan-0.5.3-Durden-0.3

[Cape]

?? I don't understand... Does it emulate Wayland and X right from the get-go?

Also is that an opengl context on his own?

Too many questions!

[Vistaus]

It looks like the Durden desktop have its own applications.

http://durden.arcan-fe.com/

So you can not run X applications.

You can run Wayland applications and it partially emulates X. Don't spread misinformation, please.

[starshipeleven]

?? I don't understand... Does it emulate Wayland and X right from the get-go?

Also is that an opengl context on his own?

Too many questions!

supports wayland applications and partially emulates X, but the X emulation is far less polished.

[timofonic]

supports wayland applications and partially emulates X, but the X emulation is far less polished.

I'm really unable to understand Arcan and Durden, despite I'm starting to understand Enlightenment (another very interesting but strange beast).

[Vistaus]

I'm really unable to understand Arcan and Durden, despite I'm starting to understand Enlightenment (another very interesting but strange beast).

Enlightenment is a WM/DE, just like Durden. But Durden only works on Arcan and Arcan is a totally different display as it's built on top of a game engine rather than the usual. And Durden also has some unique features (okay, maybe a few other WM's/DE's are able to do some of them, but not by default and not in an easy-to-configure way).

[vurpo]

Wayland is nothing more than a display server protocol. If Durden supports Wayland applications, it doesn't "emulate" Wayland, it simply is a Wayland server. Just like Gnome Shell, Plasma, Weston, or Enlightenment are also Wayland servers.

[starshipeleven]

I'm really unable to understand Arcan and Durden, despite I'm starting to understand Enlightenment (another very interesting but strange beast).

I like that there are such parallel projects, completely different. Exploring different ways.

[crazyloglad]

I'm really unable to understand Arcan and Durden, despite I'm starting to understand Enlightenment (another very interesting but strange beast).

Maybe the picture here helps: https://arcanfe.files.wordpress.com/...9867076999.png

You don't need to understand the whole thing (and there's quite a lot more going on than this), but just think of Arcan as "Xorg" and Durden as the "Window Manager". The WM lives inside a Lua- virtual machine instead of a regular process, but has the same general advantage (errors in the window manager doesn't kill clients and you can switch window managers while running). It also gets access to a more advanced API than what a WM had through Xlib, and much stronger control over clients.

There are other, window managers than Durden around as well. Prio is a more lightweight and easier code to play with, and a yet-to-be-released VR one.

[crazyloglad]

supports wayland applications and partially emulates X, but the X emulation is far less polished.

It doesn't emulate X, it's literally Xorg patched to use the internal IPC mechanism in Arcan as its DDX - same as XWayland. I don't go through the XWayland approach of redirecting windows and running rootless as I much prefer the 'VM' style of work so its easy to separate trust domains, hence why there's also a QEmu backend. The bigger reason though is that the IPC subsystem supports sharing in both directions, and I want to scriptably control - per Xarcan instance - what a client gets to 'see'. For example, when an sandboxed client tries to run things like XGetImage, it gets an artistic rendition of 2Girls1Cup rather than desktop contents. When something tries to listen to the global event loop, it gets a slow playback of my list of honeypot accounts and passwords.

If anything, the Wayland support is less polished as it is, comparably speaking, a nightmare to code for: an extremely quirky API, documentation stopping mid sentence, conformance suite not up to date/working/compiling, extensions being a scavage hunt, lots of toolkit bugs as soon as you step away from GTK (and applications like gnome-terminal refusing to work with wayland) - the full list is unfortunately very long.