Arcan Open-Source Display Server Continues Progressing As Alternative To Wayland, Mir

A few months back I wrote about Arcan: A New Open-Source Display Server Built Atop A Game Engine. Sadly with most niche and ambitious open-source projects along these lines, they tend to disappear over time, but Arcan on the other hand continues moving forward so far.

Arcan is unlikely to pose any real threat to Wayland/Mir/X.Org as taking over the Linux desktop, but the Arcan display server is still an interesting and fun piece of tech to explore. "Durden" is also being developed as their example desktop environment developed in-step with Arcan.

The Arcan display server has picked up a number of features this summer including crash recovery support, a dedicated full-screen mode, and more. Arcan developers are also maintaining their own QEMU display driver along with ports for SDL 1.2 and SDL2 so that games making use of the Simple DirectMedia Library can run on top of this experimental display server.

Coming up the Arcan developers plan on working on multi-GPU support, a Vulkan graphics back-end, more UI tools for Durden, and other features.

To find out more about the latest work on Arcan, see this monthly project update.