
Arcan versus Xorg – Approaching Feature Parity - buovjaga
https://arcan-fe.com/2018/10/17/arcan-versus-xorg-approaching-feature-parity/
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bluejekyll
First time I’ve heard of this project, so saving others a click:

 _Arcan is a powerful development framework for creating virtually anything
between user interfaces for specialised embedded applications all the way to
full-blown standalone desktop environments. Boot splash screen? no problem.
SCADA HMI for your home? easy peasy. Xorg backend? got you covered. Wayland
compositor? sure thing.

At its heart lies a robust and portable multimedia engine, with a well-tested
and well-documented interface, programmable using Lua. At every step of the
way, the underlying development emphasises security, performance and
debugability guided by a principle of least surprise in terms of API design._

From the about page, same site as OP.

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Y_Y
And how did it manage to stay under the radar for so long. I hear about
Wayland all day.

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nickpsecurity
Author has been posting a lot about it over time on Lobsters:

[https://lobste.rs/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=arcan+crazylogad&w...](https://lobste.rs/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=arcan+crazylogad&what=stories&order=relevance)

Lots of interesting write-ups and comments. Check them out.

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chrissnell
Can I get a lobste.rs invite? First I've ever seen the site and I love it
already.

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eitland
I have spent a few minutes looking for an email address to send it to. You can
try contacting me on @eitland on twitter (I just followed your account I
think).

Edit, to clarify: The only way I know I can send an invite is to input the
email address and an invite message into my settings page at that site. I'm
not aware of another way to send it.

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nsomaru
Could you invite me? Hnusername at gmail

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eitland
Done.

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tzhenghao
Hey, do you mind inviting me too? Email is on my profile. Thanks!

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eitland
It is not visible in the profile. (The email field is hidden for other users
and only used for password resets AFAIK).

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kitotik
Wow, this seems to be a critical step towards the truly modern, networked,
multimedia terminal(not an emulator?!) I’ve been fantasizing about since 1995.

I completely respect the project owners desire to fly under the radar, but man
it sure seems like more contributors would be a good thing to help us finally
move past the monstrous x11/xorg legacy.

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DaiPlusPlus
Is “network terminal” still a useful target? Disregarding the “elegance” of
the X model, isn’t there still merit to the integrated approach of Windows’
User32 and kernel-modec local high-performance, low-latency graphics? It’s not
like Crysis players in 2007 were asking for remote terminal support then - or
now.

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beagle3
Well, Citrix, Remote Desktop, TeamViewer, Rainway, various VNCs, AnyDesktop
and a bunch of other systems show that remote access to desktops is an
important requirement, for gamers as well.

The lines between a "network terminal" and a "remote desktop" are essentially
nonexistent.

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DaiPlusPlus
Citrix, MS RDP, TeamViewer, VNC and the majority of those other tools you
mentioned use fundamentally different architectures to X: they’re based on
either local framebuffer mirroring (VNC, TeamViewer, etc) or proxying the
local (2D) graphics and windowing API (Citrix, MS RDP). All of those systems
are still based on _fast_ local-only graphics and windowing systems, not the
“network-first” design that X brings.

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XorNot
Windows Remote Desktop is essentially a perfect remote desktop experience.
Being able to walk away from my desktop, login remotely and get fast, properly
scaled desktops, and then walk back to that machine and log back in to the
same environment is something that can't be efficiently replicated on Linux
with X, as far as I know.

Like, you can get "near" the concept - but definitely not there.

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Zardoz84
I got a far better experience using NX on a slow internet connection many
years ago. MS RDP, VNC, TeamViewer or NoMachine modern solutions are really
far inferior solutions compared when X was network transparent and some one
managed to add async + intelligent cache over it (NX protocol)

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drewm1980
Hopefully it is just the tone of the writing, but your description of how
clipboards work makes it sound like clipboards will still be terrible in
Arcan. As a user I no interest whatsoever in a clipboard managers. Basic usage
(text from one window to another) is so often frustratingly broken, that if
you can fix it, that alone is reason to switch to Arcan. Promise me that when
I paste I will see whatever text I just copied, and I will praise your name
forever.

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pedrocr
You experience broken copy/paste in Xorg these days? I don't think I've had
any issues in maybe 10 years.

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drewm1980
Well classic stuff like xterm and vim work great; it's the new stuff like
browsers (or maybe the js heavy pages they run) that are flaky.

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vfclists
This project is one I have been watching for some time and want to see it
succeed.

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c487bd62
[https://www.youtube.com/user/arcanfrontend](https://www.youtube.com/user/arcanfrontend)

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newnewpdro
I'd appreciate a similar writeup comparing Arcan to Wayland... after a cursory
read of the linked article it sounds like a major difference is how window
decorations are handled (client vs. server side). Though my Wayland knowledge
is probably rather stale by now.

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zlynx
Wayland is just a set of protocol definitions.

You want to compare Arcan to a Wayland implementation. Like gnome-shell. Or
weston.

Or Arcan. Adding Wayland support to Arcan has been a thing.

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newnewpdro
Just having a thorough writeup describing how Arcan and Wayland differ in
their overlapping areas would be useful in comparing how their architectures
differ.

I understand Arcan is larger in scope than Wayland, but Arcan must have a
protocol and architecture behind said protocol that can be meaningfully
compared to Wayland's.

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crazyloglad
The closest you'll get is the the "Clients and Privileges" section, and I much
prefer to spend time on "what is" and "what will it become" than comparisons.

Part of the problem is that Xorg is much more well defined in that most can
grok "what it is" so there is a point of reference to base an explanation from
without 'too much' confusion, there's stuff to work on that isn't IRC logs or
mailing list posts which is seriously 90% of Wayland right there.

Wayland is not a "protocol" in the traditional RFC/Jon Postel sense. Heck,
even the spec PDF itself referred to itself as a Display Server. There's
single X extensions with far more coherent descriptions than all of the
Wayland Ecosystem. It's full of overloaded terms and technical WTFs!?. If
anything, its the worst parts of Micosoft COM resurrected. An asynchronous
Object Oriented IDL. Run for the hills.

Some say it'll fix security issues, it'll fix performance issues, it'll fix
world peace -- with barely anyone answering or questioning "how", "why" or
"why can't X?". When you counter-argue its feature anaemia it is "oh it's just
a protocol, the compositor fixes that" and when you question the feature
bulimia it is "oh that's compositor extensions, not the protocol".

Neither position is substantiated by its technical underpinnings, the protocol
parts itself, nor the documentation, nor any of the the 'project goals'.

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kitotik
Upvoted for thoughtful, accurate points, but mostly for giving me the phrase
‘feature bulimia’.

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crazyloglad
It's your weapon now. Use it wisely.

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nerdponx
As someone with limited knowledge of how graphics on Linux work, I have no
idea what this is. Can someone explain?

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snazz
Is there are a usable demo or reference implementation of a desktop
environment based on Arcan? Something akin to Weston for Wayland?

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AnIdiotOnTheNet
Yes, it's called Durden [0]. There was also AWB, now defunct [1].

[0] [https://github.com/letoram/durden](https://github.com/letoram/durden)

[1] [https://github.com/letoram/awb](https://github.com/letoram/awb)

