A few days ago it was announced Release of the new version of Arcan 0.7.1This marks a year of development focused on interoperability, post-quantum security, and expanding its network capabilities. This version not only reinforces its position as an innovative alternative to X11 and Wayland, but also It integrates crucial tools for gaming and daily productivity.
One of the most visible milestones is the integration of Gamescope, the composite server developed by Valve. Arcan now allows launching Steam games directly without needing to resort to Xwayland, eliminating a layer of complexity and potentially improving performance in gaming environments.
For those unfamiliar with Arcan, it is an engine for creating desktop environments and not tied to a separate graphics subsystem y can run on various system environments (BSD, Linux, macOS, Windows) using pluggable backends.
For what Arcan is a curious combination of a streaming media processor, a game engine and a display server With a novel design that is well suited to complex and simple interactive real-time graphics projects alike, and blends well with anything from sci-fi user interfaces to some integrated homegrown project. to full desks.
It is very modular, It has few dependencies, but comes with all the necessary batteries included.
Main new features of Arcan 0.7.1
In this new version of Arcan 0.7.1, the Desktop usability has taken a leap qualitative thanks to the improvements in the Qt plugin qtarcan. Now It is possible to run applications based on Qt5 and Qt6, such as the Qbittorrent torrent client or the Binary Ninja reverse engineering tool, natively on Arcan.
Furthermore, the The community has responded to the security needs with patches and scripts. To integrate KeepassXC, the Xkbd2Lua utility has been introduced, which allows converting X11 keyboard layouts to Arcan's own format, further reducing dependence on legacy libraries.
Another improvement is in the core of its network architecture, as it now The directory server now supports two new types of links:
- Reference Links: They allow the creation of trust chains where one server can redirect the user to another ("my server" to "my friend's server"), facilitating the exploration of distributed networks.
- Unified Links: They allow you to group multiple servers under a single logical namespace, invisible to the end user, ideal for managing hybrid infrastructures (e.g., home server + VPS).
On the other hand, now the Customers can now automatically resume interrupted connections without losing the window state, and the –cast option has been added to share a session in "read-only" mode with other users, similar to a one-way transmission.
Post-Quantum Security
Preparing for the future, Arcan has implemented support for the algorithm post-quantum encryption ML-KEM. This measure protects communications against the threat of "collect now, decrypt later", ensuring that the data transferred today cannot be compromised by future quantum computers.
For developers and administrators, External resource resolvers have been introduced. These can intercept storage requests and redirect them dynamically, allowing, for example, data to be loaded directly from BitTorrent, IPFS, or the web instead of the local disk.
Development and Debugging
The development environment is also evolving. The Cat9 command shell includes a new DAP-compatible debugging backend (Debug Adapter Protocol), facilitating code inspection both locally and remotely. Additionally, packages for the Nix package manager are being developed, with the goal of creating a fully functional and reproducible boot environment based entirely on Arcan and the Durden desktop.
Finally, The project has migrated its main development from GitHub to Fossil, Although it maintains a mirror on Codeberg to facilitate community collaboration, it warns that the GitHub repositories will no longer receive updates.
If you are interested in knowing more about it, you can consult the details In the following link.