>>4296Arcan and surrounding projects is something I want to do a write up on soon. But I'm happy to see you've gone down the rabbit hole already. That blog is a treasure trove of good information and the lead developer of the Arcan project is a great guy. He's also the type of person that quietly works on things without causing drama and attempting to beg for donations and/or raise a stink everywhere.
Arcan as it exists now is already a great project and usable as a daily system along with everything that comes with it like A12 and his new IPC protocol. It solves so many issues with how the desktop works and problems things like dbus are attempting to solve and doing very badly. The only reason it isn't more well known in my opinion is organizations like FreeDesktop/IBM/Red Hat are 100% opposed to improvements in those areas that aren't their own protocols/implementations. Really hard to compete and get exposure again an organization like IBM/Red Hat/Freedesktop as it has the might and money of the major tech companies and the US military/NATO behind it. As we've seen most of the things coming out of their camp have been a disaster. dbus itself is a massive security hole and doesn't solve the problems it claims to be solving.
Arcan is great because things like Xorg/Wayland can be abstracted away and the applications designed for them can continue to work while running under Arcan. The main issue with Arcan at the moment is there aren't any big DEs/WMs written for it. There are two though both of which work pretty well. But they're reference implementations intended to show off what it can do instead of being used as a day-to-day system for most users. Thankfully, Arcan is finally getting more attention and people are working on filling those gaps. But just imagine if it had the excitement behind it like something like Wayland currently does. But it won't since it's really hard to beg for donation money if you base your software on something that isn't flavor of the week/month.
I suspect Arcan will finally break out and become more well known once some bold person builds an entirely new Linux distro and/or BSD around it. Perhaps one being sold on hardware the same company is producing where everything 'just works' out of the box without requiring the end user to configure everything and hand pick hardware. There exists a huge segment of the market that would really like something like Arcan powered desktop.
Imagine if a company sold workstations, laptops, tablets, phones, VR gaming system and a home server solution ('personal cloud') that allowed you to share applications between all of those devices in real time without any of the current hacky solutions like remote desktop applications. Arcan can already do this today provided you know what you're doing and take the time to set it up.
For example: At home right now I have a home server, two workstations and a laptop all running Arcan and talking to each other through A12 protocol. I can run a game like Touhou 15 through wine on one of the workstations. Then I can drag/drop it over to the laptop in real time without any dropped frames or it crashing. I can play on the laptop for awhile then drag/drop it over to another workstation whenever I want. I can even pause the game, drag/drop it to the home server then stream it to any other display device in my house. Later on I can unpause it and play it off the server or I can of course drag/drop it back to the original workstation it was started on. While I don't have a tablet/phone to test this I could drag/drop it to one of those too and continue playing the game there if I wanted. All while having the choice to use the original input device on the original system or transferring input to another device on the other systems. It really is amazing.
Whenever you bring up Arcan in the usual wayland vs. Xorg threads though people that have never used it assume it's just like Xorg's networking features and claim it's crap. Even though A12 is much improved over X11. Also, most of those people have never used X11 networking over a decent connection/LAN either. Since it works pretty well as is depending on what you're doing over the network. If it didn't it wouldn't have been so widely used in the 80s/90s after all. But everyone's memory of it being slow/crap is from attempting to use it over old slow dial-up/ISDN/aDSL connections back then. They've never used it on a proper modern LAN and they've probably never configured it correctly. Same goes for the claims of it not being secure.
Wayland itself I won't go into much other than to say it has a lot of problems and is a bit of a disaster. It's certainly a regression from even X11 and none of its "security features" are really secure. They're more for doing things like preventing you from taking screenshots of a browser window running Netflix than ensuring no one can steal your password. It's security theater intended to normalize DRM in other words.
I'll try to do a deep dive on Arcan and surrounding projects soon.