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.

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?

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.

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.

The most confusing thing about it is that it's supposed to be a 'display server crossed with a game engine', which to me implies that it should have tons of flashy demos, as its a very visible component, yet I only see slide after slide that arguing that it is the future.