Author Archives: bjornstahl

‘Tis the season to be jolly and just about time for the definitely last release of the year for both Arcan and its related subproject, the Durden desktop environment. Following the pattern from the last release post, lets go through some … Continue reading →

A commonly held misbelief about one of the possibly negative consequences with migrating from X11 to Wayland is that the system as a whole will become more brittle due to the merger of the display server and the window manager … Continue reading →

(… and for system graphics, games and other interactive applications but that would make the title just a bit too long…) Many of the articles here have focused on the use of Arcan as a “desktop engine” or “display server”; … Continue reading →

It’s just about time for a new release of Arcan, and way past due for a new release of the reference desktop environment, Durden. Going through some of the visible changes on a ‘one-clip or screenshot per feature’ basis: Arcan … Continue reading →

disclaimer: this is a technical post aimed at developers being somewhat aware of the problem space. There will be a concluding ‘the day of…’ post aimed at end users where some of the benefits will be demonstrated in a stronger … Continue reading →

A new version of Arcan has been tagged. There is no demo video or fancy screenshots this time around; those things will have to wait until updates come to the related projects (mainly Durden) in a few weeks. Most of the … Continue reading →

It’s not uncommon to only bring up monitors when talking about display server outputs, but there are more subtle yet arguably important ones that doesn’t always get the attention they deserve. One such output are LEDs (and more fringe light emitters … Continue reading →

This post is about experimenting with imitating and extending the window management concepts from the venerable Plan9, Rio. The backstory and motivation is simply that I’ve had the need for a smaller and more ‘hackable’ base than the feature-heavy Durden environment for a while, and this seemed like … Continue reading →

TLDR; Crazy person is trying to do something about how nightmarishly bad the interface between you and the command-line/command-line utilities really is, i.e. getting rid of terminal protocols.   To start with ‘why’? If you have never had the pleasant experience … Continue reading →

I spread the coding effort needed for protocols and 3rd party software compatibility out over longer periods of time because the underlying work is mundane, tedious and very very repetitive. The QEmu backend is by far the more interesting and potent … Continue reading →