I like Nix as well, you can use this one liner in OSX or Linux to try out arcan/durden/cat9, as it matures you can expect arcan applications to be made available the way html pages/apps and this kind of nix derivation would let you run the "browser":
> Ultimately it appears to be software with more fans than productive users.
Correct. You can swing productive usage of Durden and the rest of the kit in its current state, but it's still an experimental piece of software under active research and development. As it stands, it's more attractive to daily drive xorg as a default while keeping arcan around to hack on and experiment with.
It's been rapidly closing the gap towards usability over the last few development cycles. I can speak for myself as tentatively waiting for 1.0 before abandoning xorg totally, which is at least a few years away.
Despite having read about it multiple times I still don't feel like I know what it is. My best guess is that it's an operating system, minus the kernel? But also it can be used as a GTK/Qt type interface layer? Or it can be used to replace X/Wayland? So like, a super modular operating system? And now I guess it's also a web browser, or a generalization of web-browser-like things that may or may not actually be compatible with the traditional web?
You're close! I'd recommend checking out this blog post which frames it as such and goes into motivations and how the architecture ends up panning out at a high level:
Arcan scratches the same kind of itch that nix does for me but for the gnu/linux graphics stack and everything that has to interact with it.
I like Nix as well, you can use this one liner in OSX or Linux to try out arcan/durden/cat9, as it matures you can expect arcan applications to be made available the way html pages/apps and this kind of nix derivation would let you run the "browser":
nix run --impure 'git+https://codeberg.org/ingenieroariel/arcan?ref=nix-flake-buil...'
I remain confused by Arcan, even having looked into it a few times over the years.
Ultimately it appears to be software with more fans than productive users.
What are you confused by?
> Ultimately it appears to be software with more fans than productive users.
Correct. You can swing productive usage of Durden and the rest of the kit in its current state, but it's still an experimental piece of software under active research and development. As it stands, it's more attractive to daily drive xorg as a default while keeping arcan around to hack on and experiment with.
It's been rapidly closing the gap towards usability over the last few development cycles. I can speak for myself as tentatively waiting for 1.0 before abandoning xorg totally, which is at least a few years away.
Despite having read about it multiple times I still don't feel like I know what it is. My best guess is that it's an operating system, minus the kernel? But also it can be used as a GTK/Qt type interface layer? Or it can be used to replace X/Wayland? So like, a super modular operating system? And now I guess it's also a web browser, or a generalization of web-browser-like things that may or may not actually be compatible with the traditional web?
You're close! I'd recommend checking out this blog post which frames it as such and goes into motivations and how the architecture ends up panning out at a high level:
https://arcan-fe.com/2021/09/20/arcan-as-operating-system-de...