Alright, I'm probably sold. A couple of Wayland's greatest faults are that 1. they enthusiastically broke everything that X provided except for displaying windows on screen, and 2. after 16 years so far, they haven't actually provided replacements. So anything that lets us improve on the X server while keeping backwards compatibility is a huge leap forward; I just want to see if the compat is good enough for accessibility and automation tools[0] to work smoothly.
[0] This is 1 category, not 2.
Of course, Arcan looks good enough, and actually exposes enough API surface, that if it's not compatible with my existing tools then yes I probably will write whatever I need over its native APIs and just run with that. But it'd be nice if I didn't even need to do that:)
"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?
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"
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://
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...
