(26-04-2021, 03:24 AM)Ramiferous Wrote: Was this renamed to Pipeworld or is this a fork? This, along with Prio are really interesting. Druden is still pretty cool on its own, but Pipeworld takes the cake.

I haven't had the chance to try it out yet, but I am looking forward to it.

This weekend I gave Arcan a try.

To put it simply, Arcan is the core backend framework and server that runs and provides the mechanism for anything else. It can take lua scripts to execute on top of it, the "main" should be found in one of these scripts which you pass to Arcan to run. Arcan has different graphical backends, from SDL, X11, to Wayland.

safespaces, durden, prio, pipeworld, are all separate lua scripts that you can run with arcan and using arcan's framework.
The only one I couldn't get running on my machine was pipeworld.

Some examples:
Along with the main script you can pass a folder containing the resources and additional scripts or libraries that you need or want to access from within Arcan.

One drawback is that Arcan is kind of containarized, you can't access anything outside the resources folder, and I couldn't find a way to run external applications from within Arcan. There are ways to launch programs that support Wayland and to have an embedded X server (called Xarcan) from within Arcan but I didn't get to that yet.

Apart from this, the concept is really cool in itself, I liked it a lot. It's snappy and flexible.
Yet, I think it kind of needs more documentation and people trying it out to make it more usable on a day to day. But definitely worth looking at!

(26-04-2021, 04:06 AM)venam Wrote: The only one I couldn't get running on my machine was pipeworld.

Damn. If you couldn't get it working then I've got no hope.

(26-04-2021, 04:06 AM)venam Wrote: Apart from this, the concept is really cool in itself, I liked it a lot. It's snappy and flexible.
Yet, I think it kind of needs more documentation and people trying it out to make it more usable on a day to day. But definitely worth looking at!

I really hope it progresses to a point where end users can simply install arcan/xarcan and their wm(lua script) such as pipeworld or Prio or Durden from repositories, and have it work out of the box. That would be pretty sweet.

(27-04-2021, 03:23 AM)Ramiferous Wrote: I really hope it progresses to a point where end users can simply install arcan/xarcan and their wm(lua script) such as pipeworld or Prio or Durden from repositories, and have it work out of the box. That would be pretty sweet.

voidlinux comes with packages for arcan, there's also a docker image available.
One thing that could be great is to also have a nix package for it, this would also testing without interfering with the rest of the system.

(27-04-2021, 03:23 AM)Ramiferous Wrote: Damn. If you couldn't get it working then I've got no hope.

I think it might have been an issue with my local lua version.

On that note, the author of arcan has written an interesting post about divergent UIs: here. There's also a thesis by the htop/userland.org author here. Along with the classic Trends and evolution of window interfaces, that makes for some good reading material (pdf here).

On IRC we were also discussing ZUI. There's a good paper on that here and some people are working on actual implementations. There's eaglemode, pipeworld, mcol is working on wimp. I'm not sure of other implementations.

We should also probably mention the concept of skeuomorphism, which is kind of contested these days.

Thanks for sharing those links. When I get some time I will try and set up a void virtual machine. I have been told it will work under a VM using SDL rendering, and that direct rendering may in face be possible using a GPU passthrough. But I just want to see it in action, I'm not super concerned about performance just yet.