>>108047695
sex

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Here is an overview about the issues with current terminal emulators. It's the last in the series of articles about it so make sure to check out the links to the past posts at the top of this article.

https://arcan-fe.com/2025/01/27/sunsetting-cursed-terminal-emulation/

Cat9 is _very_ nice. It allows you to multiple task within the terminal itself and gets rid of all the cruft from current terminal emulators.

I've been hacking on Arcan for the last year or so and it's really great. I'm running it on two of my systems with no problems at all. Using the proof of concept DE the hackers around Arcan have made. It allows for full network transparency of any application (even games) so you can move them between running systems.

Arcan has a new protocol for all of this called A12. They're also working on a new IPC system called SHMIF. You can read the full docs here:

https://chiselapp.com/user/letoram/repository/arcan/index

I'm shocked that development is so active yet I never see any discussion about it on places like /g/, orange reddit or reddit itself.

The main issue with Arcan at the moment is that despite being packaged for most Linux and BSDs no one is providing an out of the box OS built around it. It really is great.

Yesterday I was playing a steam game on my desktop and decided I wanted to switch to my laptop. A simple drag+drop to the other system by moving the window plus hooking up a joystick to my laptop and I could continue running the game without losing state. Even though I was in an online lobby at the time with 6 other people. All wine/proton stuff like that works just fine. Along with anything else built on top of X11 or Wayland.

Anons should check it out and get involved with development if they can. They have a very active IRC channel. I've heard discord is active to if that's your thing. But I think it's mostly just a bridge to the IRC channel using bots.

Some of these guys have been working on this for over a decade.

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I talked about this a little in my last to posts but I want to drive the point home about having a fully networked desktop. Anons should read this article: https://arcan-fe.com/2023/11/18/a12-visions-of-the-fully-networked-desktop/

The short version is with the A12 protocol all your systems can function together seamlessly. They don't have to be full blown workstations. It's like X11's ability to network with all the flaws fixed.

Have a tablet you want to use as a screen for your game running on your home server on the LAN? No problem. You can play the game on the tablet with the server doing all the heavy lifting. You can use an input device connected to the server over a long usb -> Ethernet -> usb run or one hooked up to the tablet itself. All your state will transfer over fine and there is no lag if you do it that way.

Want to move your game/application from your desktop to your laptop without losing state? No problem. Or you can keep running it on your desktop and access it from your laptop to let your workstation continue doing the heavy processing. You can even do this with an android phone too. Applications and their state drag+drop seamlessly between any device you own running the A12 protocol. It's the holy grail everyone has been wanting.

It can be improved and polished of course. Still in heavy active development with no 1.x release yet. But the last two releases are already usable day-to-day with no issues. Full support for all your legacy applications that expect X11 or wayland.

I'm shocked more people aren't using it since it's already working fine on Gentoo and every BSD I've checked (FreeBSD, NetBSD, and even OpenBSD). I've not checked Debian and other mainstream distros on the linux side. But I'm sure it's packaged on them already or easy enough to package.

I wanted to bring more attention to it since the lead developer writes very good articles and development is very active. We need more WMs/DEs built on top of it.

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Last time I'll post roll I just like cute girls. Not trying to avatarfag and be annoying.

Anyway, here is a good video that shows what I'm talking about. It's a demo from the 2023 release. A lot of things have improved since then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIFjzN7dk10

As you can see the terminal allows you to do multiple jobs. Including having video and images in the terminal without a bunch of hacks like we usually have to do. In addition. You can move jobs inside the terminal to their one windows. Then you can move these windows to other devices. That tablet isn't simply another display. It's another device running the A12 protocol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIFjzN7dk10

Input devices can be shared between multiple devices. Every device in your home (and even other the internet) can now share the same running applications and state of them can be moved between devices whenever you want.

Here is the article that goes along with the above video: https://arcan-fe.com/2023/12/19/arcan-0-6-3-i-pty-the-fool/

This is just a basic demo WM built on top. There is a fully featured DE called Durden you can check out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vY2B9m5HDM&list=PLGqpKIeZOSp6quf6CmMOr91Tmj4UppyoR

You can see more videos of other tools built on top of A12 here: https://arcan-fe.com/videos/

This protocol is amazing and the lead developer is a wizard. Come join us on #arcan @ irc.libera.chat

https://github.com/letoram/arcan/wiki/BSD#openbsd
Is the information here still correct?

>>108047856
Yes it's correct. I used it a few weeks ago to get A12 working on my OpenBSD system (a laptop). There are some minor issues as stated because of OpenBSD's custom build/patch set for X11 called Xenocara. But the basics work fine. I haven't tested games on it though because OpenBSD obviously doesn't support wine any longer. They would probably work by running remotely on another system and just using the OpenBSD system for display+input devices. I can confirm things like video, Cat9 and all other applications work fine. I've been using A12 to move my emacs state around without any problems.

So far I've tested it on:

>Gentoo (although I'm using my own overlay that's diverged heavily from the default profiles).
>OpenBSD (see above)
>FreeBSD (working video+input devices so far)

I don't have any phones to test since I don't buy them anymore. I might try my 2014 or so android device that can no longer connect to the cell phone network soon. Since wifi continues to work on it and I've been thinking about installing a custom ROM. I only use it for reading while I'm taking a shit and sometimes reading books while in bed.

I have a tablet laying around that I also need to test on.

You will have to compile everything yourself as stated. Which is why I haven't tried non-Gentoo Linux distros yet. It should work fine on all of those because linux distros are all the same at the end of the day. But it doesn't seem a lot of people are maintaining packages at the moment when I last looked (over 2 years ago now).

X11 and wayland applications just work because the A12 protocol supports them. Obviously there isn't a lot of stuff written for the A12 protocol itself at the moment. There are diagrams in the articles I linked above if you want to know more about that.

I don't know what a wayland or x11 is but the girl is cute so I trust you

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>>108047937
Basically, A12 is a new protocol for building a desktop that is fully networked. It supports existing applications for UNIX built on X11 and anything wayland-only (only like two that I know of and the only useful one is the android emulator that I discovered so far).

I don't like wayland but I'm not going to shit on it. X11/Xorg also has its share of problems that will hopefully get improvements with the recent fork.

But the point is you can run a DE/WM built on top of Arcan and still have access to all your "legacy" UNIX GUI applications within it. Which means things like proton/wine works just fine within A12. You don't have to give up anything you currently have to run it.

Also calling Cat9 a "terminal" isn't really correct but I used that because people are familiar with the concept of a terminal/shell = CLI. Cat9 is a new way to do CLI that avoids all the cruft from current terminal emulators. The links above can explain it better than I can.

I should have linked to the about page in the OP: https://arcan-fe.com/about/

You can read more about X11 support within Arcan here: https://arcan-fe.com/2018/10/17/arcan-versus-xorg-approaching-feature-parity/

>>108047856
You should also read this anon: https://arcan-fe.com/2018/04/25/towards-secure-system-graphics-arcan-and-openbsd/

Covers some points about porting to OpenBSD. Not it's 8 years old now and things have changed a lot since then. But still a good overview.

And the wiki of course: https://github.com/letoram/arcan/wiki

I know it's a lot of reading. Sorry. I'm still learning myself. There is a helpful diagram somewhere that shows how Xorg (Xarcan) and wayland applications fit into the protocol. But I'm unable to find the article the image is in right now. So have another Roll-chan.

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>>108047999
I found the diagram. It was actually in the article I first linked in the OP. I know it's a lot of reading but it's worth your time to go through a lot of his posts about the design of the project and how it differs from X11/Wayland way of doing things.

Note I do not run wayland other than a handful of things ported to OpenBSD that require it as a dependency. In other words when I do use wayland for something I'm doing it through Xorg (well Xenocara in this case). Wayland has some issues due to its design that makes it hard to fit into the A12 way of doing things. Thankfully, there aren't many things with a hard dependency on it. For "legacy" stuff you're better off sticking to X11 things because they're more well supported at the moment. But work is happening to get wayland support up to par.

Arcan is radically different from what we currently use. But it lets you do things like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RSvk7mmiSE

Moving an active game before two devices without losing state. You can even hot swap input devices or continue using the one on the other machine and letting it send button presses over the network. Your choice.

A12 is really great. The only thing we're lacking right now is a something like Openbox, KDE, Gnome of typical DE most people expect running on top of it. Their proof of concept WM is okay and I like it well enough. But if you aren't someone into dwm or similar WMs you might now like it. Durden is floating windows and you might not like how it does things. It isn't intended to be the final DE/WM it's only built to show proof of concept. But it is easy enough to use day-to-day and I'm enjoying it because it gives me features I can't get anywhere else.

If you're into VR good news because there is a lot of development happening on that as well.

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>>108048048
pufferfish wit da big ass lip

>>108047695
so does this support hdr/vrr or what

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>>108048052
I like this bot more than the cuck license one. I'm sure it'll be coming along soon.

I just wanted to share some information about Arcan because I really think it's the way we should be going with the *nix desktop. It does a lot of things right now that X11 can't do (or does worse) and wayland will never be able to do. The idea of all my systems being linked together really appeals to me and I'm going to add more into my little Arcan network I have going.

>>108048060
It supports anything the application already does as long as it can run through the protocol. It's a work in progress. But progress is happening much faster than it is in wayland and X11 at the moment.

I don't have it running on a monitor where I need those things. All I can tell you is my mixed refresh rate monitors (I run 6 on one machine I have it on) work just fine when I boot into my Gentoo installation running Arcan. I have HDR but I don't think the patch has made it into the public X11 forks yet. I can't share it sorry. I'm under a NDA. We tried to share it with freedesktop years ago and they would not accept it. I've heard support in the fork that guy made is coming soon since development on the Xlibre fork seems very active at the moment. But I haven't tried it yet because I need the machine I have with HDR support to run what I've been using for years already. Adding HDR is not hard. It's not some amazing new feature its been hyped up to be either.

I just think it's a shame so much good work has been done on this project and hardly anyone talks about it. The lead developer knows his stuff and is very easy to get along with. The other guys working on it are as well. They work quietly and churn out updates 2-3 times a year that no one seems to notice.

Arcan is more than just a new display server. It's intended to change the way we use our systems. It's intended to work on multiple systems and supports multiple users concurrently if you want that.

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>>108048048
>Arcan is radically different from what we currently use. But it lets you do things like this:

That video shows an X11 application (a game) running on one system then being dragged+dropped to another. If you'd like to read more about how this is done using the new IPC there is an article about it here with more demos: https://arcan-fe.com/2020/10/28/a12-advancing-network-transparency-on-the-desktop/

It's a lot of information to take in I know. I'm still learning myself. You could spend hours on this man's website just reading about the project and how everything is done. I highly suggest going through his posts because they're all very good and you'll learn a lot.

I should have mentioned that you can use lua to modify and extend arcan/the DE. You get support for a good scripting language to make whatever you want on top of all the tools provided.

AwesomeWM is probably the closest well known WM that is similar to the reference DE Durden. Durden is packed with features and it would take me many posts to go through them all. I'm still stumbling up them myself. It's intended to be a demo so it does everything. The hope is soon people will start building DEs on top of Arcan and native applications for it.

It's hard to get stuff that requires Qt/GTK to work within the new protocol. But support is there and I haven't had any problems getting more stuff going. Although I tend to stick to GTK2 when possible.

If you're interested in writing a client for arcan start here: https://arcan-fe.com/2019/03/03/writing-a-low-level-arcan-client/

We need more skilled developers to get involved with this project. The goal is to make it fully portable to all UNIX-like OSs. So far it is with a few road blocks here and there. He's got it running on the Steam deck and multiple phones/tablets already.

I encourage everyone to at least spend some time with Lash#Cat9. I think you'll find that it's much better than whatever shell you're currently using.

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Here is another good article he wrote about X11 being used of the network and how it compares to what they're doing in A12.

https://arcan-fe.com/2018/11/16/the-x-network-transparency-myth/

I guess the best way to describe Arcan is the following:

It is a re-write of X11 that does true network transparency in a better way. With a new IPC protocol. Native applications obviously work great but there are few of them at the moment because hardly anyone is interested in Arcan other than the developers that have been quietly working on it for years now. "Legacy" applications are supported but they require doing a lot of stuff to make them conform to A12's way of doing things. Applications written for X11 are supported well enough right now. Wayland is a bit harder to make work due to the way it's designed. But it's getting there and a lot of good people are working on it. Thankfully, the vast majority of applications you want use X11 at the moment. Anyway, those "legacy" applications are run in their own little container which handles the needed IPC stuff to make them work with the A12 way of doing things.

I didn't intend to start out writing this much about Arcan when I posted the thread. I hope someone found this useful and checks out this project. Even if you don't use it the posts the lead developers have made on their website are very insightful and you'll learn a lot if you take the time to read them. There are also a lot of video demos showing off the features of Arcan that are too large up to load here (I'm lazy and don't want to make webms tonight).

If you have the time please try Arcan out. If you like it please come to the IRC channel and help out if you can. Everyone is nice and there is none of the drama that seems to be happening in most FOSS projects today. No politics and no CoCk.

I'm going to sleep take care anon.

No use, Arcan is not a part of the controlled opposition. Besides, the last time I tried it the latency was not acceptable.

> Why isn't there already a distro built on top of it?

There are some packages in nixpkgs, but with no maintainers.

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>>108048245
>the last time I tried it the latency was not acceptable.
What is your local LAN like? I've got 1Gbps here and everything works okay. But I wired my house with 5 cable drops behind each place I wanted to connect to the LAN. I need to get a new switch and router because I'm limited to 1Gbps despite having 2Gbps fiber hook up a long with a cable modem with about 500Mbps (advertised, it's usually much slower). I also need to buy new network adapters for all my computers. Since they don't support speeds above 1Gbps as is.

Anyway I haven't had any issues with latency even over wifi. It's acceptable and works fine on my network. I expect it to be even better once I buy all the hardware I need for 10Gbps. I screwed up badly when I bought switch+router because I never expected to have a fiber hook up in my area. But then they decided to run it out here for some reason. My latency has even been good when I've use it over the internet as long as I was at someones house with fiber or the higher tier cable speeds.

It's better than using X over the network because you can send the entire app+its state over to the other machine. So as long as the machine can handle the application's requirements everything is great. Maybe it wasn't as good a few years ago? Wifi will be worse than ethernet of course due to its built in latency.

>>108048353
I mean local latency, how quickly display manager responds to inputs. Arcan just felt sluggish to me.
Maybe they fixed this, I dunno.

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>>108048245
>There are some packages in nixpkgs, but with no maintainers.
This seems to be an issue with a lot of nixpkgs. I honestly do not like the nixpkgs or NixOS itself due to it having a hard requirement on systemd. If you want to run it without systemd you end up in a situation where you have to maintain all the packages yourself.

I can see the appeal of Nix for people managing multiple systems. But I think Guix is much better because the language (scheme) is much better. Nix has a lot of issues due to the language it's using. But I like lisp and I understand a lot of people don't.

When I used Guix for awhile the packages seemed to be well maintained. The only issue I have with them is they are GNU zealots so they won't help you with non-free stuff like GPU drivers. Which most everyone is stuck. Another issue with Guix is the GNU website has been getting constantly ddos'd since last year. So attempting to update packages was frustrating. I also dislike all the little issues it causes when you want to do simple stuff like editing your dot files. It's better than Nix in that respect but it's still a pain. Not worth it if you only have a handful of systems that aren't things like web servers. The /store also consumes a lot of space. But Guix > Nix every day in my opinion.

I ended up going back to the BSDs and Gentoo. Since I like pkgsrc, ports, and portage.

>>108048378
Ah I see. I haven't had this problem. Perhaps it's just your system? What were you running it on?

I was late to the party so maybe it's something they fixed. I played several games that require quick inputs (fighting games) and I didn't notice any different between it and running them natively on X11.

Another thing is with modern monitors, games and input devices there is a built in latency anyway. My joystick can do 1ms latency on the right hardware (CRT). On my 144hz monitor latency is 4-5ms IIRC. Then add another 1ms on top for the joystick.

Seems very interesting, I tried it years ago but didn't take a closer look. Arcan might just be what UNIX truly needs. I always thought X11 should have been rewritten instead of creating Wayland, which inevitably breaks everything because everything needs to be built to cater to Wayland. A "better X server" is a far more reasonable project.
I'll see if I can contribute to it one of these days.

I've read a number of the Arcan development posts and I've been interested in the development but never had the energy to actually try migrate X11 configs built up over close to a decade. It's ironically one of the larger blockers for wayland with me: just needing to bother with replacing all my muscle memory-level familiar applications, desktop session init files and custom utilities/scripts built around, and fundamentally tethered to, the X11 ecosystem. I understand a degree of that is not necessary since the compatibility between Arcan and X11, I just wonder if I really have the mental energy anymore to get my head around a completely new graphical session model and the way that one interacts with it. One day I'll actually RTFM a bit more and maybe some of this concern is unwarranted.

>>108048422
I agree that wayland was the wrong way to move forward for UNIX. It broke everything and has split the community with all the different implementations. It's becoming a situation where you're locked in to not only using it but also having to choose between different implementations of it.

I'm really concerned with the Qt/KDE vs. Gnome/GTK split that is happening. Since the 90s you were able to run both on your system if you needed it and they both would work with your display server. Now we're getting into a situation where it might not be possible for both of them to run together on the same system. Since each has their own implementation of the wayland protocol.

The protocol itself is really bad and don't allow you to do a lot of things X11 did.

>>108048457
Yeah I know what you mean. I don't like the direction modern Linux is taking with the old UNIX way of doing things being thrown away for this new stuff. Which doesn't do a lot of things I need or does them ass backwards. The everything wanting to be tied to things like udev, logind, systemd etc. is really awful and has broken so many of my old scripts. I can keep running my old stuff if I maintain it myself but every day I'm having to hack around some new shit that's being pushed out by the mainstream distros.

I'm a fan of the UNIX hater handbook but at least the UNIX way was easy to understand and deal with. Now with Linux diverging heavily from the UNIX way it's getting to the point where I'm sick of maintaining my Linux boxes. The stuff is so bad it's now bleeding into the BSDs because it's required to port over a lot of that stuff to keep things like DEs and Qt/gtk applications working.

There are a lot of projects that solved the problems this stuff claims to solve without breaking everything else. s6 is a much better service manager/init than systemd. Arcan is a much better solution than wayland. But both of them are getting no exposure.

>>108048488
I wanted to add that I kind of shit on Guix earlier but I really liked the Sheperd init. It's all lisp so it's right up my alley. In general I don't see the bit deal about the init and all the things systemd claims it does. They talk about fast boot times but how often do you boot your system? Mine is on all of the time. I've been like that since I first got a computer as a kid. Just let it run when you aren't using it. I guess if you were paranoid and ran encryption you'd want to shut it down more often. But the vast majority of people don't care about the difference between 10 seconds and 5 second boot time. I'm content with good old shell scripts starting things up one after another. I don't start a lot of shit when I boot anyway unless I'm using a server. I don't really care about server boot times either since they're supposed to be up all of the time.

Then you look at how parallel start up really works in systemd and you find out it's just a hacky piece of crap that fakes services already being up and holds any data that's supposed to go to them. I don't like it and I don't like things like binary logs. I really dislike it running as root all of the time because it's so large. Most of what it's doing should have been taken out and ran as separate daemons with reduced privileges. Which is what s6 does. It's too bad the guy that made s6 doesn't like writing proper man pages or helping out newbies. You're stuck figuring everything out yourself. Also things like runit and old OpenRC were fine in my opinion. They worked for decades. sysvinit was fine at what it did but I understand why people wanted to improve upon it. PID1 should be small though and I feel like systemd only exists to eventually cause vendor lock-in. It's already doing it right now.

Sheperd was really nice though. I'd like to see it used in other distros. I did really enjoy Guix but the constant ddos'ing of the repo servers really made it a pain to update packages.

>>108048541
>I feel like systemd only exists to eventually cause vendor lock-in. It's already doing it right now.
I should elaborate.

We've already got things that will not send you data if you aren't on a "secure" system. For example, the major streaming services will refuse to send 4k/1080p/higher bitrate streams to a device that doesn't have a secure boot. So the only devices that can get that data are things like set-top boxes (e.g. AppleTV). On a desktop it already requires you have a TPM chip, secure boot enabled and an init that supports it. So anyone using old school BIOS can't use the service. Which excludes so many old systems. There are tons of desktops out there that are 10-15 years old that are plenty fast that end up being obsoleted just due to not having the TPM chip.

The more things like systemd are pushed on Linux the more we see these large companies offering you access as long as you're running their DRM and locked out of your own machine. They send you a video stream but you can't copy it from RAM or even off the cable it's sending the stream over to the monitor. All you get is a black screen.

I do not like the fact that they're locking me out of my own systems like this or making perfectly good hardware obsolete through DRM. I expect we'll see more of this in the future and eventually they'll say you can't connect to anything at all without having the TPM+secure boot. Imagine is something like Cloudflare started enforcing that.

hey I'm glad someone is promoting this project. I've been tinkering on and with Arcan and have been intending to make a WM (in the Arcan colloquial sense) for awhile, I've just had higher priorities preventing me. I will gladly help social promote it any time I catch a thread, though. so here's a bump as I sit on the office toilet.
oh and the real way to promote this is to provide video demonstrations. ain't nobody but full-time nerds gonna read allat.

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>>108048541
Oh and speaking of boot times and sorry I know I'm getting off topic but;

The boot times with systemd aren't faster than the old way of doing things in my experience. On my workstation I don't run logind, udev, and a variety of other things people claim you need these days. My system boots very fast once I select a kernel in GRUB (I don't like modern GRUB either honestly). Anyway, once I select something in GRUB my system is up in seconds. It's very fast. I boot to console, log-in and launch Xorg (not running as root). It's very fast.

I've used systemd a lot because I need to know it to maintain servers and work on other people's systems. The boot and shut down times for it are always slower than the old fashion way of doing things or using new stuff like runit for the init. Even without parallel start up of daemons. Everything comes up quickly then I get a console in seconds. With systemd there is a long wait at start up and half the time it won't listen when I tell the system to reboot or shutdown because stuck jobs are running. To make matters worse the documentation for it is crap and so is the way you're supposed to interact with it. It also doesn't respect my config files. It's really frustrating.

>>108048643
Hello toilet anon I hope your dump is going well.

Yeah I understand a lot of people these days do not want to read. It's very disappointing that everyone lost their attention span. I've linked to some videos and pages that contain many more. But I'm not in the mood to make a overview for youtube or deal with becoming some wannabe e-celeb.

I do like the fact that the project isn't well known in some respects. Since the people working on it are nice and skilled. If you're in the know you're in the know. The fact that it isn't well known has kept a lot of the usual problems with popular projects away from it. There aren't any people that don't code hanging around trying to push politics.

Anyway I hope your dump goes well.

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>>108048643
Can you tell us more about your ideas for a WM dump anon?

I've also been tinkering with Arcan and thinking about making an Openbox clone. On my laptops I've moved on to using dwm most everywhere. I have my own small version with a few patches. Using the keyboard on the laptop is much nicer than having to use the nipple for everything.

But on my desktop with multiple monitors I still enjoy the old floating WM way of doing things. Since I have a track ball using the mouse is a big deal and it allows me to quickly go between monitors. I also solved my carpel tunnel issue.

I think what Arcan is lacking is good WMs/DEs built on top of it. The demo DE is okay but I've prefer something more like openbox.

I think the main issue is getting people behind developing applications for it. So much stuff depends on Qt and gtk. I worry that those of us wanting to stick with X will be left behind soon as they adopt wayland. At some point they're going to say they maintaining support for X is too much work/buggy/whatever and drop support all together. Which will leave us with having to maintain older version ourselves. Which will further split the community.

That's always been the problem with FOSS. The community split up over so many projects over petty disagreements. It's insane that I have to pull in 500MB of crap just to run a notepad clone if it happens to use Qt instead of gtk2. It works the other way around if you prefer Qt.

I can have a small fast system with few packages but if I need something that depends on Qt or gtk I end up having to pull in so many other packages. You also end up with packages wanting different versions of them. It's a real pain. I'm still sad we lost control of gtk and freedesktop took over the problem. It was much better when gtk2 was the mainstream version in use and the community was maintaining it themselves. I think if freedesktop didn't get involved we'd already have a great DE that everyone agrees on.

>>108047896
Arcan is not foreign to me, and it's unfortunate that OpenBSD support remains the same as it was; the pufferfish shouldn't have to swim through these sharks. I assume the documentation also applies to NetBSD, since it also provides X11 in its base system. Does Arcan even support NetBSD? There's no mention of it anywhere in the documentation, and neither Arcan nor durden are available in pkgsrc. NetBSD shares wscons(4) with OpenBSD. Porting shouldn't be difficult.

As for my experience with Arcan (under Linux), for some reason (which I don't remember), its performance was unacceptable to me; in fact, I didn't even bother to find out the cause of the problem; Wayland wasn't as prominent as it is now (GNOME wasn't GTK 4 yet), and it seemed that X11 would still have support forever. But now that Wayland continues to threaten X11, we need Arcan more than ever. I'll follow this thread.

>>108048911
>911
nice

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There's something a little surreal in stumbling upon lines and lines of text in this place and realizing it very clearly wasn't written by some LLM, more so when it's about a relatively obscure topic. Thanks for the write up, I've been interested in X11 forks and other alternatives apart from Wayland for a while now, so I'll be sure to save the links for further reading. Here's an android as some tiny reward for your posts

Arcan is even more meme than Wayland

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OP, leave the lolis at school next time.

>>108050847
oof looks janky

>>108048583
Always get 1080p, always disable secure-boot. I don't need secure boot. Only the Mossad has the capability to select a boot device on my laptop and not be me.

>>108047707
fpbp

>>108050847
this, please.

>>108048188

Cat9 is just completely bonkers good. I am fighting my muscle memory so hard but this is so clean and snappy.

What I get from the idea behind Durden is that it's actually an abstraction to quickly piece together a WM from. The way to mimic older window managers is figuring out which of the ~600 or so paths and make a preset with that and keybindings.

Most window management schemes I can think of is already there just hidden.

This gem was in 2017?! .. how could one possibly improve on wobbly windows? well..

https://videos.files.wordpress.com/zmiBKUyQ/snow_hd.mp4

>>108055587
Yeah Cat9 is really amazing. If you take nothing else from the project just having Cat9 is a real game changer.

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>>108047695
What are the chances, I've been thinking a lot about Arcan in the past few months and it's clear it's finally starting to become a real, serious thing after so many years.

It's truly revolutionary stuff, I have nothing much to contribute for now. I have all sorts of funky computing experiments in mind I wanna put Arcan at the epicenter of though. May chit chat about it on the IRC channel at some point.

Here, have a cute girl as well. My arcan session will have l'moe wallpaper.

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>>108048393
>I honestly do not like the nixpkgs or NixOS itself due to it having a hard requirement on systemd. If you want to run it without systemd you end up in a situation where you have to maintain all the packages yourself.
Since you mentioned it:
Some other anon brought up SixOS (s6 NixOS) a little while ago. https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/106479806/#106480404
According to SixOS's author, it was meant to be a personal experiment / proof-of-concept.
Indeed, very DIY and high-effort but I kind of see arcan in a similar light. It's boundary pushing / redefining stuff and centered around very recent advancements (in the SixOS case it is that modular services were a recent merge, IIRC)

Apologies for the disorganized writing. Been feeling a little spastic lately lol but that's neither here nor there.

Really, am glad to see anons catching onto this rising wave of alternative software. What I find fascinating about this wave is that it's more perpendicular than parallel if that makes sense. "Have your cake and eat it too". Much lateral thinking. All that stuff.

>>108055587
reminds me of my granny tits

>>108056798
>SixOS
Yes I'm aware of SixOS. There was a presentation about it as a conference last year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSW3YJ8uyBI

I don't know how many people are pitching in to help maintain packages. My guess without looking would be now that man. Since all the manpower seems to be behind things using systemd as a basis for the entire lower part of the system these days. I'm not a big fan of the Nix language and its tools for managing stuff like ~ directory aren't nearly as good as what Guix offers. But I wish them the best if they're serious about keeping IBM software out of their distro.

>>108056915
>My guess without looking would be now that man.
My guess would be not that many* Not sure why my fingers went full retard.

I know SixOS is using doas instead of sudo which is all well and good. But there is still the same issue the doas port for linux has had for years now: The fact that without some of the OpenBSD kernel code being ported over to the Linux kernel things like persistence does not work securely. First thing most people do is turn it on anyway because they get tired of constantly typing in a password for every command. Which kind of defeats the point of replacing sudo in the first place.

>>108056915
>>108056938
Nix is pretty opaque I'll give you that, but so is Guix, I guess both for different reasons.
>does not work securely.
I don't know anything about that, but
>First thing most people do is turn it on anyway because they get tired of constantly typing in a password for every command. Which kind of defeats the point of replacing sudo in the first place.

To be fair, IMO this drives the point home of how passphrases are an archaic mechanism in the SSO and security key world we live in.

>>108057143
Keys are not anymore secure than passwords. The password isn't the problem. Being stupid and enabling something that says
>DO NOT TURN ON
instead of using doas -s is the problem.
>Guix and Nix opaque
I do not like either. They're both overly complicated solutions to a problem that doesn't exist for 99% of users. Containers like Docker are bad too. All of this is the result of terrible software being pushed so widely by default.

Oh the two though Guix is certainly the better option because it's more well thought out and was able to learn from the early mistakes of Nix. For example, having a proper language to do configuration with. But that doesn't make up for the stupid stuff like having to store so much crap in /gnu/store or it being a pain to make a simple modification to your own dotfiles. It all feels like a dirty hack (because it is). It's something people wouldn't need if the rest of the software on their system wasn't designed and published by masturbating monkeys.

The main issue with Guix outside of the above is the fact that the GNU servers have been under ddos attacks for going on 2 years now. Making retrieving binaries impossible most days. Plus the fact that you'll get zero support if you aren't using one of the few PCs with no binary blobs at all. The GNU people will blame any issue you have on those binary blobs and kick you out of all support channels. Even if you ask questions about things in general and don't ask questions about stuff like GPU drivers. They're really annoying and look down their noses at everyone. Turning away a lot of people that would have helped. Most users can't be blamed for their hardware choices because a lot of them didn't know about binary blobs when they purchased or got gifted a machine. Most of them aren't in a position to spend $1k+ on a new laptop or desktop simply to appease GNU zealots. Most people don't give a fuck about GPL vs. BSD vs. MIT licensing. They just want their shit to work.

nice thread.

I've been keeping tabs on Arcan, though I still only have surface awareness of it. Since I plan to add it as a backend to a GUI toolkit I'm working on, to make it support natively X11, Wayland and Arcan, making it into an exotic multiplatform library (but not in the classical Windows/Macos/Linux sense).

Considering that adding a Wayland backend alongside an initial X11 backend required quite a bit of restructuring/rewrite due to their fundamentally different philosophies; does anyone here knows how "differently" writing an Arcan client is/feels using low level libs like shmif (as my toolkit is on the xcb/wayland-client level)

I have no idea what arcan is, why should I care, this is too much to read.

>>108057457
>why should I care, this is too much to read.
Why should I reply to your question if you refuse to read?

>>108057494
Well, it's a lot of text. Maybe a quick explanation. I've been using the same shit forever.

>>108056891

If my grans only swayed this smooth.

>>108057426

It's similar to a cleaner libx11 with more convenience features. https://arcan-fe.com/2019/03/03/writing-a-low-level-arcan-client/ seems pretty thorough.

>>108048728
If arcan had a *box wm I would have switched to it years ago, as I seems really well designed and x11 is being phased out and wayland is fucked beyond repair. I personally don't care about the whole network thing, but I see why it is important.

I realized that the WM is one of the most important security boundries and needs to be well written and designed. As I am not a professional programmer it is not something I can do/help with.