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":
I love the idea of arcan, I like how as a counter point to waylands "X went to hard, the display server should be a dynamically linked shared object" there is one solitary guy doing his own thing saying "X did not go hard enough we need an even more seamless, recursive solution to move our display between different devices" and doing amazing work on this problem.
But just like plan9 I have a hard time actually doing anything with it. Achingly beautiful software, but just a little to different and obscure. And I say that as an OpenBSD daily driver, where apparently I thrive on the pain that comes from using an obscure system.
But I am currently back on the plan9 kick, seeing if I can get it to stick this time. I may give arcan another try as well.
Even the style of writing screams "I'm doing something weird and I'm not going to explain it to you unless you are already a mega-fan". Reminds me of Wolfram's writing a bit. He's created a world that only he is in and then writes about it in detail as if everyone else is there too.
> But just like plan9 I have a hard time actually doing anything with it.
For me Plan 9 isn't about daily driving or how useful it currently is, rather, It's for exploring a new way to build software. There are lots of pieces missing but that's the fun part, you get to build them!
As for daily driving, 9front has vmx(8) so you can run virtual machines on supported Intel hardware. I know a dev who runs Linux (I think OpenBSD too) in vmx using VNC to run a browser. 9front Drawterm also has a few tricks to work in reverse where the Linux resources are exported to the Plan 9 workstation.
Edit, I should also mention that Arcan is close to how I would envision building a web OS using Inferno: don't start with a browser, start with a highly portable OS who's user space lives in a VM.
> 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.
Arcan is a display server, in the category of X, wayland or rio
The focus of arcan is to make the final display target super flexible.
So X was designed to be network agnostic, the programmer could use the same protocol and depending on how the end user had it configured it could be displaying on the same machine as the program via local shared objects or on a remote machine via tcp. But X never was able to dynamically transition between the two, there was no way for X to move a window from one machine to another. This is a core goal of the arcan project. I think the thing that gets people confused is along the way there is also a lot of adjacent experimentation in really wild window managers and control scripts. That is, what crazy things can you do once you have this amazing window location flexibility.
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:
The vision of "one desktop, many devices" (https://www.divergent-desktop.org/blog/2026/01/26/a12web/#a1... ) seems perfect for cloud hyperscalers to own all of compute. Your desktop will be in the cloud, the only computer with enough CPU power and RAM to run your stuff, and you will be allowed to access your desktop from any device you license from the cloud hyperscaler.
I already have that with my Apple devices, kind of. I can drag my mouse from my MacBook Pro to my iPad, use my iPad (or Vision Pro) as a secondary monitor, or the same with my Mac mini, I can start a document on one platform and continue it on another…
All in all I love the ecosystem, it’s very convenient.
As a separate note, I don't see how A12 Web (https://www.divergent-desktop.org/blog/2026/01/26/a12web/#a1... ) is different from the current web, where (Javascript) apps are downloaded and run locally (in your web browser) all the time. There are some additional checks for digital signatures and package integrity, which are typically taken care of by HTTPS in the current web.
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.
In that regard it's the plan9 of display servers.
I love the idea of arcan, I like how as a counter point to waylands "X went to hard, the display server should be a dynamically linked shared object" there is one solitary guy doing his own thing saying "X did not go hard enough we need an even more seamless, recursive solution to move our display between different devices" and doing amazing work on this problem.
But just like plan9 I have a hard time actually doing anything with it. Achingly beautiful software, but just a little to different and obscure. And I say that as an OpenBSD daily driver, where apparently I thrive on the pain that comes from using an obscure system.
But I am currently back on the plan9 kick, seeing if I can get it to stick this time. I may give arcan another try as well.
> just a little to different and obscure
Even the style of writing screams "I'm doing something weird and I'm not going to explain it to you unless you are already a mega-fan". Reminds me of Wolfram's writing a bit. He's created a world that only he is in and then writes about it in detail as if everyone else is there too.
> But just like plan9 I have a hard time actually doing anything with it.
For me Plan 9 isn't about daily driving or how useful it currently is, rather, It's for exploring a new way to build software. There are lots of pieces missing but that's the fun part, you get to build them!
As for daily driving, 9front has vmx(8) so you can run virtual machines on supported Intel hardware. I know a dev who runs Linux (I think OpenBSD too) in vmx using VNC to run a browser. 9front Drawterm also has a few tricks to work in reverse where the Linux resources are exported to the Plan 9 workstation.
Edit, I should also mention that Arcan is close to how I would envision building a web OS using Inferno: don't start with a browser, start with a highly portable OS who's user space lives in a VM.
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.
Arcan is a display server, in the category of X, wayland or rio
The focus of arcan is to make the final display target super flexible.
So X was designed to be network agnostic, the programmer could use the same protocol and depending on how the end user had it configured it could be displaying on the same machine as the program via local shared objects or on a remote machine via tcp. But X never was able to dynamically transition between the two, there was no way for X to move a window from one machine to another. This is a core goal of the arcan project. I think the thing that gets people confused is along the way there is also a lot of adjacent experimentation in really wild window managers and control scripts. That is, what crazy things can you do once you have this amazing window location flexibility.
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...
The vision of "one desktop, many devices" (https://www.divergent-desktop.org/blog/2026/01/26/a12web/#a1... ) seems perfect for cloud hyperscalers to own all of compute. Your desktop will be in the cloud, the only computer with enough CPU power and RAM to run your stuff, and you will be allowed to access your desktop from any device you license from the cloud hyperscaler.
It would also be killer in a glasses/vision pro future.
I already have that with my Apple devices, kind of. I can drag my mouse from my MacBook Pro to my iPad, use my iPad (or Vision Pro) as a secondary monitor, or the same with my Mac mini, I can start a document on one platform and continue it on another…
All in all I love the ecosystem, it’s very convenient.
As a separate note, I don't see how A12 Web (https://www.divergent-desktop.org/blog/2026/01/26/a12web/#a1... ) is different from the current web, where (Javascript) apps are downloaded and run locally (in your web browser) all the time. There are some additional checks for digital signatures and package integrity, which are typically taken care of by HTTPS in the current web.