arcan

This is actually a small proof of concept for the much larger project that is Arcan or Arcan-fe. Did a fair amount of research into it. Its philosophy is to move away from the traditional desktop experience and create fundamentally unique, new interfaces. More on its founding principles can be found on this site: https://www.divergent-desktop.org/blog/2020/08/10/principles.... The core of Arcan is written in C with a little Lua and takes inspiration from game engines, display servers, and streaming multimedia processors. It combines similar functionality of these traditionally seperate low level graphics to create an all-in-one graphical display engine. According to this slideshow (https://speakerdeck.com/letoram/arcan), the "last mile" for making any gui/tui can be as little as simple scripts. Writing scripts(mostly lua as of right now)

It is my understanding that the Arcan system enables such usage: https://arcan-fe.com/about/ https://github.com/letoram/arcan https://github.com/letoram/arcan/wiki/Features

I recently came to know about Arcan which is the alternative to both Wayland and Xorg . https://github.com/letoram/arcan

I think in order to understand this properly you have to build and try out Arcan for yourself. It took me a little while to understand the LuaJIT application structure but without that in mind this seems like- "a terminal with graphics attached" which it most certainly is not. This is more of a solution to the vast amount of protocols used to shovel data to the user in the UI message pump in a fairly static way. Shmif allows sharing this data between apps without all the translation, stubs, and overhead that normally comes with the territory: https://github.com/letoram/arcan/wiki/Shmif

There's Arcan: https://github.com/letoram/arcan . In the words of the developer, it is a "multimedia engine" (a combination of display server, game engine and multimedia framework). It is an interesting project and the YouTube presentation is pretty convincing: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=07nqZIFRDJg A great example of what a motivated and disciplined developer can achieve.

You could try to transition to the sway wayland compositor (which is largely compatible with i3wm) or maybe to https://github.com/letoram/arcan which is a lot more programmable than sway

> 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. I'm very happy they started that list with security, which links to a nice security overview: https://github.com/letoram/arcan/wiki/Engine-Security One of the things no one mentions is how awful security is on X.

The 'you can install linux, arcan and durden and then run normal applications' assertion is correct. That's how I am using it. The screenshots were taken on OSX because that was the only handy thing I could do the video recording on at the time. It's possible to 'test it out' with X/libsdl as a backend. The actual setup is a bit hairy on most distributions because everything brings in X as a dependency, but I have both Alpine Linux and Ubuntu16.04 running it here without X (or dbus or pulseaudio or systemd or ...) Here [1] is some proof and [2] are my rough notes on how I did that. The whitelist part is entirely optional, it's only there for really security paranoid stuff later on (sandboxing policies and chain-of-trust starting). ARCAN_CONNPATH=durden /some/bin style 'launching' is entirely possible. The second to last slide goes into th

Here's the github link: https://github.com/letoram/arcan