With 2026 being busy squeezing out banger after banger of bad to terrible news, we somehow still managed to meet up in the fort for what was this time referred to as the “Hackspace at the end of the Universe”.
The troop configuration was a bit different than initially planned, as team Europe could not get permission to travel from mommy work. Meanwhile our South American representation, to whom we send our sincere condolences, got a last minute kick in the groin from life and mother nature herself. 2026 keeps on trolling us.
Instead, we were left with an all-Swedish cast and two new faces forming what can best be described as a prolonged episode of “The Young Ones”.
Alex was first on scene peacocking what may just be the most cursed themed Durden to date (challenge accepted). Following the general vibe of 2026 where the “I made this” meme is now the default for every form of expression, one can clearly see that it is a completely novel and fresh exploration of brand new ideas.
He was promptly followed by Simon, Omni and Nicki. We warmed up by drinking mate, eating kebab pizza and gossiped about just anything to avoid getting any work done. That eventually failed. Alex continued his Gamescope work, after the obligatory hours of troubleshooting whatever Nix was up to this time. As we are being taught elsewhere, being stateless means you never learn.
He generalised the Pipewire wrapper parts and convinced it to on-demand launch for us folks that do not have it running elsewhere for sanity reasons. Then he made the foolish mistake of asking why it crashes when requested to reset, shutdown or migrate to a networked connection. This turned into a journey that would consume the rest of his time here and evolved into a full blown thread sanitiser whack-a-mole with the conclusion that Valve should not be left near pthreads without adult supervision ever again and receive a stern talking to about the role of asynch-signal system calls in signal handlers. At journey’s end he expressed a strong will and hope that he is now done with this now and will not have to touch the code base ever again. The following clip is an illustration of how that is going:
It does seem that upon RESET Xwayland takes their pitch in stride and Pipewire will have none of it. Sorry Alex.
Omni and Remote-Valts-not-slacking-at-work have recently packaged some of the stack on AlpineLinux and he continued this journey to extend that to include Durden, Cat9, Xarcan and so on. These packages are now pinned to much more recent commits than Bjorn’s pitiful release cadence, and split into more fine-grained packages than one would find elsewhere, perhaps soon to be on a PostmarketOS Nura capable device near you.
Simon, the other newcomer, got to dive into the deeper end of writing Arcan appls by prototyping an appl generator plugin for Pandoc, something that will become more relevant soon. He will surely share the results online as soon as he learns to stop being afraid of sharing code and embrace that whatever stage you are in, it is never shameful to share code — unless “assisted” by an LLM, that is.
Nicki did not get any real work done, mostly because she is a dog, but she is forgiven because she is a good girl.
Lastly, Björn dove into something he has put off for a year or so, and that is swapping out the SDL2 platform backend for SDL3 in Arcan proper. It can now be tested through the –DEXPERIMENTAL_SDL3=ON flag at build time. It should be on-par with what the SDL2 one delivers, but the real point (file-picker integration, dma-buf import and so on) will have to wait until he can somehow trick Alex or Magnus into doing it for him.
Slightly more interesting is that he also started bring-up of an SDL3 platform driver using SHMIF. After about an hour of actual code then days of build system shenanigans and header file mumbo jumbo, because CMake is a thing, there is finally an accelerated spinning cube:
Now he just needs to get the other toes wiggling, but that is for another time.