[systems]

from the about

"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. Custom Interface for your Home Automation Project? sure thing. Stream media processing? Of course."

Still dont really understand what this is?

[somat]

It is a windowing system, but one taking more inspiration from X than wayland. So it is all about remote programs and transferring displays from one device to another.

Personally, I find this area of study much more compelling than wayland.

I also love how on the one side, you have the X crowd(admittedly me) saying "look, we have worked on this thing for 30 years it works and has this massive accumulated feature set". And on the other you have the wayland crowd saying "yes that's the problem, we could do so much better by throwing all that out and starting over with a local compositing focused struct". And then, amid this huge fight, not bothering anyone, you have one person, who comes out of his cave every couple of months and goes, "look at this, I made a new windowing system from scratch that is designed around transferring windows from one device to another"

[ingenieroariel]

It is a gui framework that allows you create terminals where you can detach any running process into another terminal.

Since it is a complete toolkit, you can have detachable applications where you send both code and state to a server and retrieve it from another device (like Apple's continuity).

In the end it is just a bunch of lua scripts talking to other components via /dev/shm and to other computers using a new protocol called a12://

[spencerflem]

I've been trying to understand it for a while now, it seems very cool.

Best short answer I have is that it's a lot of things working together. At it's core there's an IPC interface that's geared towards real time audio/video and an event loop that's scriptable in Lua that can read frames, process them, and then draw it to the screen.

This lets you do cool things like having parts of the frame drawn by another process, or on another computer seamlessly. And its more secure to punt things like codec processing on another thread anyways since those are common targets for exploits. Plus, the scripting ability makes it very easy to intercept streams and modify them as you please.

There's more to it, I recommend the blog, it has a fun sort of zen riddle tone that I personally like a lot. This article is my favorite: https://arcan-fe.com/2021/09/20/arcan-as-operating-system-de...