This is a beautiful looking OS, and the idea of "spaces" may be worth exploring. I was just reading about Facebook's failed Home phone project where rather than apps, the interface was focused on people.
I thought it was a real OS, and wanted to try it, as I've got a Fire tablet gen 1 that is looking for a new use.
Weird question, the credits say Mercury is dedicated to Jef Raskin. Why not have the home screen in the demos say "Good Morning Jef," instead of Jason? Who's Jason?
Oh boy I’d like to play with something new and exciting like this and was sad to hear it’s just a design mock-up/idea. The OS space seems to have been quite stale for a decade or two, is there anything super exciting and different out there from a UX perspective? Remember installing Linux in the late 90s or rooting Windows phones and installing whatever latest Android OS was available in the early days of iOS and Android, and that was always quite thrilling.
The other hard part besides hardware is that an OS is useless without useful apps (or at least a browser) so the OS dev also has to recreate the entire suite of browser/email client/word processing, etc etc which now requires even more effort, or some kind of window/linux compatibility layer, but in that case you might as well just spin off another Linux distro
I see where they are trying to go with the "humane" approach, but the examples seem to require big companies to play along. For example, the shopping examples put the control back with the user, and companies supply basic info like pictures, pricing, descriptions.
In real life, of course, they won't cede that control easily. You'll get the same sort of mess you see on Facebook Marketplace, for example..."for sale" listings of cars that put the down-payment in the sales price spot and some wording telling you to call for more info. No actual prices are shown.
So, it would probably require some sort of unapproved scraping, collating, etc, to really work as intended.
The web lost track after the dotcom. In the beginning there were protocols. Now we're in the corporate moat period, where N corporations build the same thing N times because each one of them wants to dominate the others. Consequently, we were left with low-level protocols and languages (http, html, css, etc); there is no standard for buying shit online, despite most businesses being online. No standard for payments, no standard for query/search/browsing, etc. Compare that with, e.g., computer graphics, where graphics vendors (except Apple) collaborate on the development of standards like OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenXR, and shit works relatively seamlessly modulo vendor bugs and extensions.
This is like in the 60s when they would reimagine cars w/ out steering wheels. 60 years later and we still have steering wheels. Maybe one or two ideas will stick. that's it.
I presume that if this got beyond some pretty sketches there would eventually be some kind of way to install new "verbs" and "nouns" and "modules", maybe even a place to go exchange money for interrelated collections of these things... How this would differ from "I downloaded Plunko 3D from the App Store" remains to be seen.
Sure, but what does that look like under this OS? The mock-ups don’t show anything more complicated Han messaging apps.
Other comments have stated that this is some student project of some sort. Like many other projects of this type it has failed to consider what most people actually do during the course of their jobs. Worse, it ignores what ‘nerds’ do on their computer while posting on a ‘nerd site’.
Oh yeah, all of that's very much undefined. Every attempt at a "humane" interface inspired by Raskin's post-Macintosh work always stops well before getting to that point.
There may be a much better world of human-computer interaction lurking in these sorts of ideas but getting out of forty* years of refinement of the window-icon-mouse-pointer paradigm, and forty years of building all sorts of tools and toys within it that are not designed to be decomposed into separate actions usable in any context, is a huge effort.
Or there may not, I feel like people have kept trying to do stuff like this over and over again and we just keep on ending up back in the world of monolithic apps that are entire toolsheds worth of tools, each with their own way to do the same things.
* or more, I am counting from the release of the original Macintosh, please feel free to add on sixteen more years if you'd prefer to count from Englebart's Mother Of All Demos, or forty more if Vannevar Bush's Xanadu feels like the place to put a stake in the sands of time and say "modern computing methods began here".
I don't know if they could be more pretentious even if they tried:
"Mercury rejects the Desktop Metaphor and App Ecosystems as fundamentally inhumane. "
2 pages later...
"Every Module can be defined and redefined using its Locus (the action bar). Locus combines the power of a Command-Line Interface with the convenience Natural Language Processing and the discoverability of GUI."
So they reject the inhumaneness of the Desktop metaphor, but replace it with another (Locus - what even does that mean?). At least I know what an action bar is.
Then, it touts itself as a complete replacement of the old paradigms, focused on touch interactivity, but:
"You can tap the Command key to toggle the display of available actions if you are unsure of where to start."
The command key? Is this built for Apple devices only? And if it's touch centric, why do I have a key?
The dark mode in this concept looks like a complete afterthought.
I like consistency of UI; fluidity at the expense of muscle memory (like having the Windows 11 taskbar centered makes no sense for muscle memory with icons moving about as you open things). The shortcut system sounds laborious.
This looks like the exact opposite of what I would do if I were to redesign operating systems. The job of operating system is just to run application and get out of the way, and most importantly be deterministic and reliable. I don't need my OS to "predict what I might need", I know what I need myself.
It pretty much embodies everything I hate in modern OSes. I know what I want to do and I know how I want to do it, get out of my way. Meanwhile modern OSes can't even handle simple "maybe don't steal fucking focus from window I am currently writing something in just because some other app decided to make another windows."
Totally agree. I'm sick and tired of apps "helping me," constantly interrupting with tips, "did you know .." rearranging my windows and so on. I want to get stuff done not start a journey and relationship with new code. And nobody knows better than the user what stuff they wanna do.
It's like the corporate OS developers think they know better and need to constantly remind you how pathetic and insignificant your existence would be were it not for their omnipresent magnificence.
It's like perpetual chase of "new, inexperienced user", at cost of people using the OS for last 5-10-20 years, and no actual benefit to anyone using it seriously to do work.
I think this is the best argument against "telemetry" in apps. If there is no way to measure people's reactions to such annoying prompts, there would be no way for a product manager to justify it by saying "metric X went up by Y% when we showed this popup".
God, the fact that stealing focus still exists in 2023 is maddening. Please just let me open windows and apps in the background while I continue to work uninterrupted in the main focus window in the foreground. Even web browsers let you open tabs in the background, why haven’t OS’s caught up to the yet.
That said, I like the concept of this OS design. It reminds me a little of the theoretical concept behind Star Trek’s LCARS interface, where the interface adapts to the user and the task at hand. As a power user I doubt I’d use this myself, unless it could be installed on top of NixOS, but it might be more intuitive and accessible to a more general user base.
It will be hard to get rid of files and folders though, even for general users. As messy as that can get, it’s a simple abstraction burned into just about every human’s brain at this point.
I have the opposite problem. If I open too many Windows, the Windows window manager starts glitching out. When I open an app, it doesn't always come to the front and I have to go alt-tab through dozens of windows to find it. (Sometimes it ends up at the bottom, so alt-shift-tab switches to it... but sometimes it ends up in the middle...)
Also if I open too many windows, opening Windows explorer takes 1-2 or more seconds. Something about exhausting GDI handles?
How many are we talking about here, I'm curious about how many windows is too many for Windows?
I don't often have more than 30 open, and at that point I start thinking it's excessive and that I should probably tidy up to make sure I actually complete a task rather than get distracted.
Asked ChatGPT to write me a script to count the open windows :) I have 164. Although I have quite a bit of RAM left at the moment. The OS getting sluggish is usually what prompts me to close a few open apps. So having lots of RAM is bad for my productivity...
The annoying part is just that Windows explorer gets really sluggish -- to a comical degree. For example, I'll do a file operation (copy, rename etc) and it'll take that same explorer Window 5 seconds to register the operation that it itself performed. Meanwhile, Sublime Text open in the background detects it within miliseconds.
Why are you still relying on alt+tab in 2023? I haven't touched a windows for more than 5 minutes in a long time, aren't there a function to show all windows like in most Linux DE and Mac OS ?
I just looked it up, there's a thing called Task View (Win+Tab) which is this big scrolling view of open window thumbnails.
Curiously, Alt+Tab itself is very slow (half a second of lag?) but if I kill explorer.exe I get a different Alt+Tab screen which is extremely responsive.
(And Win+Tab is, of course, much slower than even the slow Alt+Tab...)
I wish I could just leave explore.exe killed, but it makes it a bit harder to do things. Maybe I should do that, to force me to program my own alternatives in Python. (They'd still be faster than what Microsoft made...)
I disable that functionality on Gnome. Alt-tab to a terminal and alt-tab back to the editor is much faster that displaying all windows and clicking on the one I want to go to. Even two or three alt-tabs are faster than that. Furthermore alt-tab don't move the screen. It only raises a window on top of the other. Everything is still. The Gnome way is to move everything on the screen and move it back to the original place. I don't suffer from motion sickness but windows should stay put where I placed them.
Focus stealing 100% has a place, just not on app launch and while you're typing. Since switching to Wayland, which doesn't allow focus stealing, I keep thinking apps have frozen when a popup shows up in the background.
Not for me. It's by far the most annoying thing any OS can do, especially that (I think?) every single fucking one have not figured out that it is NEVER desirable to steal focus from app user is currently typing into
In I3 at least it just highlights window and workspace if it is not on currently active workspace, instead of switching focus, so you know app wants something but don't get diverter.
Only thing that should be able to is app that you're using opening another window. There is no case focus stealing of different app is desirable and couldn't be just a notification.
>God, the fact that stealing focus still exists in 2023 is maddening. Please just let me open windows and apps in the background while I continue to work uninterrupted in the main focus window in the foreground. Even web browsers let you open tabs in the background, why haven’t OS’s caught up to the yet.
I3 tiling WM does it reasonable enough; I use it pretty much in "app per workspace" model (with config auto-putting started app on its designated workflow) and if app on other workspace wants focus it doesn't get it, it just lights up a given workspace and app window; there are also config options to explicitly disable all or some windows from taking focus.
> That said, I like the concept of this OS design. It reminds me a little of the theoretical concept behind Star Trek’s LCARS interface, where the interface adapts to the user and the task at hand. As a power user I doubt I’d use this myself, unless it could be installed on top of NixOS, but it might be more intuitive and accessible to a more general user base.
That idea seems to only work where either you build the interface for yourself, or for a specific narrow set of tasks
How does it embody stealing focus when this design goal is specifically about focus?
"Focused.
The clutter we take for granted in today’s operating systems can be overwhelming, especially for folks sensitive to stimulation. Mercury is respectful of limited bandwidths and attention spans."
In KDE Plasma, a window manager, you can configure "focus stealing prevention", as well as activation and raising of windows to be on click or on hover in a fairly precise way.
Still that is fairly far from the OS layer. Microsoft and Apple sell the 'OS' as a bundle with everything (a window manager, file explorer, etc) that you cannot really configure a lot, but that is a problem with their products.
I didn't understand how to interact with anything using Mercury OS. One of the first things I'll do today will be opening a terminal, git pull, then edit some files in my editor, start a Vagrant VM with Django, check the result. Nothing of what I saw on this site gives me an idea of how to do it.
That thinking is why Linux failed as an OS for desktop. The UI part is harder than the hardware part, because it deals with a piece of diverse, non logical and unpredictable piece of meatware, instead of simple and predictable silicon.
You've shared quite a number of misconceptions there (not least of all your definition of "failed" -- Linux is used by millions of consumers every day so if that's a "failure" then you have some rather unrealistic expectations of what is considered a success. But ultimately "Linux" isn't an OS anyways so it isn't really fair comparing it as one).
> That thinking is why
What kind of thinking? Acknowledging that writing an OS is a massive undertaking? I have written hobby OS kernels so I'm not speaking hypothetically here. I wasn't suggesting that the UI isn't important either (which is what I believe you were alluding to with your "that thinking" snub), just that the UI is literally just the surface layer in a much deeper stack of technologies -- all of which is important.
> The UI part is harder than the hardware part
Writing device drivers is much harder. The failure modes are much more extreme. No amount of UI polish will improve the user experience if your OS frequently trashes your file system because it doesn't handle buggy storage devices correctly. No amount of UI polish will improve the UX if your platform frequently crashes, or even just doesn't support your hardware at all. And to compound matters, the vast majority of hardware isn't documented either.
So yeah, UI is important but your OS isn't going to win any fans if you don't nail the stacks beneath too.
> [UI's] deals with a piece of diverse, non logical and unpredictable piece of meatware, instead of simple and predictable silicon.
Hardware is often anything but predictable. The fact that it seems that way is a testament to just how well written most operating systems are.
Having lived through 20+ “the year of the Linux desktop”s I can tell you the goal was clearly to become he dominant desktopOS that everyone used.
About that last part… the op was talking about people, it actual hardware, you seem to have missed that. Hardware is in fact predictable, unless it’s failing or just that poorly designed.
> Having lived through 20+ “the year of the Linux desktop”s I can tell you the goal was clearly to become he dominant desktop so that everyone use
Again, Linux isn't an operating system like Windows, macOS or even FreeBSD. Even the broader definition of Linux has it as multiple different collections of different individuals sharing different groups of packages. What one team might aim to do with Linux is very different to what another team might want to do. And "The year of the Linux desktop" wasn't a universal goal by any means. Case in point: I've been using Linux (as well as several flavors of BSD, Macs, Windows and a bunch of other niche platforms that aren't household names) for decades now and I've never once believed Linux should be the dominant desktop. I'm more than happy for it to be 3rd place to Windows and macOS just so long as it retains the flexibility that draws me to use Linux. For me, the appeal of Linux is freedom of choice -- which is the polar opposite of the ideals that a platform would need hold if it were aiming for dominance.
So saying "Linux failed" isn't really a fair comment. A more accurate comment might be that Canonical failed to overtake Windows but you still need to be careful about the term "failed" given that millions of regular users would be viewed as successful by most peoples standards -- even if it didn't succeed at some impossible ideology of a desktop monopoly.
> About that last part… the op was talking about people, it actual hardware, you seem to have missed that.
No i got that. It's you who missed the following part:
> Hardware is in fact predictable, unless it’s failing or just that poorly designed.
Don't underestimate just how much hardware out there is buggy, doesn't follow specifications correctly, old and failing, or just isn't used correctly by users correctly (eg people yanking USB storage devices without safely unmounting them first). The reality is that hardware can be very unpredictable yet operating systems still need to handle that gracefully.
The market is flooded with mechanical HDDs from reputable manufacturers which don't follow specifications correctly because those devices can fake higher throughput by sending successful write messages back to the OS even when the drives are still caching those writes. Or cheap flash storage that fails often. And hot pluggable devices in the form of USB and Thunderbolt have only exasperated the problem because now you have devices that can be connected and disconnected without any warning.
Then you have problems that power saving introduces. You now have an OS with hardware that shouldn't be connected and disconnected yet still able to power that on and off gracefully (otherwise your OS is borderline useless on any laptop).
...and all of this is without even considering external conditions (ie the physical nature of hardware -- the reason it's called "hardware"). From mechanical failures, hardware getting old, dusty, dropped etc. Through to unlikely but still real world problems like "cosmic bit-flips".
Now imagine trying to implement all of this via reverse engineering - because device manufacturers are only going to support Windows, maybe macOS and, if you're lucky, Linux. And imagine trying to implement that for hundreds of different hardware types, getting each one stable. Even just testing across that range of hardware is a difficult enough problem on its own.
There's a reason BeOS-clone Haiku support FreeBSD network drivers, SkyOS's user land was eventually ported to Linux, and Linux (for a time at least) supported Windows WiFi drivers. It isn't because developers are lazy -- it's because this is a fscking hard problem to solve. And lets be clear, using another OS's driver model isn't an easy thing to implement itself.
Frankly put: fact that you think hardware is easy and predictable is proof of the success of Linux (and...
I wasn't making any comment about the predictability of humans. However there have been plenty of studies that have proven humans are indeed predictable. If we weren't then dark UI patterns for email sign ups, cookie consent pop ups, and so on wouldn't work. The reason UI can be tuned for "evil" is precisely because of our predictability. But this is a psychological point and thus tangential from the discussion :)
To come back on topic. I wasn't saying hardware is unpredictable per se -- just that it often behaves unpredictably. And I say that because there are a set of expectations which, in reality, hardware doesn't always follow.
However the predictability of humans vs hardware is a somewhat moot point because that's only part of the story for why writing hardware-interfacing code is harder than human interfaces. I did discuss cover a few of those other reasons too but you seem fixated on the predictability of the interfaces.
"Operating system" is a frequent term in the news. I don't know where you are from.
My point is that you produced dozens of paragraphs about terminology but added zero value to the actual discussion and all that while totally understanding what others actually meant.
> “Operating system" is a frequent term in the news. I don't know where you are from.
Tech news sure. But not in average peoples news. Or at the very most, only on special tech segments. Either way, definitely not frequent.
> My point is that you produced dozens of paragraphs about terminology but added zero value to the actual discussion
I was discussing the complexities of writing hardware drivers after it was stated that it’s easier than UIs.
Where’s the value in your comments here? You are adding nothing, just arguing for the sake of arguing.
> all that while totally understanding what others actually meant.
“Misunderstanding” I assume you meant (given the context of your comments). Either way, and as I said to the other commenter (though I’m not convinced you two aren’t shill accounts for the same person given your writing styles are the same), I did understand. I just disagreed and cited some experience I had to back up my points of view.
I don’t really understand your problem here. This is a tech forum and we are talking about operating system development. Yet you’re begrudging me having a technical conversation about operating system development.
I think the entire concept of "non-techies" is condescending to the people you're referring to. Computers exist, the cat is out of the bag -- computer literacy is now simply a facet of literacy in general.
I would much prefer a world where we empower people to actually learn about the tools they use, rather than one in which we jump through hoops in order to try and design around predictions about what we think "they" want when, in reality, it's like trying to hit a billion different targets with a single dart.
We should be reaching for designs that give tools to and enable people to achieve that which they can think up with their own free will and imagination, not predictive trash that more often than not simply results in annoying the user with something that is, at best, close but not close enough to what they want to actually be useful, leaving them with the frustration of not being able to do anything about it.
That may be why I thought "this might be cool to see a video game character interact with a tablet in a futuristic-theme rpg to make for like the menu screen or something."
+1 to this, it's crazy to lose all (or most) contexts across a reboot or when switching between machines.
Each app has some sync capabilities (e.g. PowerPoint, web browsers, Google docs, chrome tabs, Firefox tabs), but there is still no universal solution.
MacOS is actually pretty good about this. It restores applications on restart, and it’s provided applications pick up where they left off.
I don’t use the workspace feature on the Mac, I assume they’re recovered as well.
Obviously applications need to be restart aware as well. I really like how the provided Mac apps (Pages, Numbers, etc. ) work with the first class document model in the system. I have dozens of Untitled documents across apps, some are years old. Never “saved” them. They just exist. Across reboots, app upgrades, and OS upgrades.
I wish more apps embraced my lazy house keeping.
I don’t know how the documents sync across devices, if at all.
I wanted to mimic the OS document model in Java with my own app, but that’s easier said than done.
Unfortunately not. After reboots, which are annoyingly often, MacOS places all my carefully organized windows and their layout into a messy pile on the first/primary space and I have to spend a significant amount of time to get everything back to the state I want. This is also a huge pain in the ass when moving between external and internal monitor, where my windows and their size ends up not how I want them every single time.
I presume you're referring to KDE Activities. I use Activities all the time, but they're still far too much of a static thing, and way too High Ceremony to create/curate/maintain.
I tried it, but it is just not there yet. My use case is switching between 3d cad design and printing apps (browser, slicer, notes) and between coding (jetbrains ide’s, terminal, browser, draw.io app)
But in the spirit of the parent article, it would be nicer if the os knew i wanted to do 3d cad printing and then organize my window with all cad/3d printing related modules. To let it create my perfect workflow because it gets my intents.
And when i switch from design to getting into the production stage, it should make the slicer module more prominent. Cad design usually are tweaks after this.
I'm sure it's "well-designed" from a theoretical perspective, and unimpeachable from the perspective of Professional UI/UX Development, but it's so inflexible and non-extensible it comes off as something between a toy and a jail cell. "You will enjoy being productive in this environment focused on channeling productivity to Approved Ends. You will enjoy using Approved Technology in Approved Ways. You will ignore everything beneath the interface, for what the Approved Technology is doing is Approved, and therefore not for you to interfere with."
> This looks like the exact opposite of what I would do if I were to redesign operating systems
Me too but to be fair, we would probably call this a desktop environment, not an OS. It's a shell that could run on top of Windows, MacOS or Linux. Data could be stored in a standard filesystem or a database and managed by the shell and presented to users as "content and actions [...] fluidly assembled based on your intentions"
Just for context: this is a 4 yo design study by friend and amazing product designer Jason Yuan, who also worked on Sprout.place and more recently some stuff at Apple (@jasonyuandesign). A lot of the comments currently seem to miss this and are focusing on immediate feasibility, “successful” design, or ability to deploy irl. That is not the point here. Things like this are both creative exposition, as well as corner stones for conversations for the rest of the community.
That's all non obvious. As far as I can tell this was just as serious as any of the other, 'this is the future', post. See the recent humane keynote for example, and the vergecast's reaction to it.
That said, it's absolutely valid to question stuff like this. A lot of design student type stuff miss HUGE usability issues.
Speculative literally means conjectural, hypothetical, toying with an idea for its own sake, though. It's not a word I associate with product of any kind, more with a sketch than a prototype.
I get a lot of value from HN, but technocratic communities often fail to understand the value of reimagining everyday things.
They sometimes get so caught up in the technical bits and pieces they don't like about something you end up with responses like those you in this discussion, or HN's reaction to Dropbox, or Shallots Slashdot's reaction to the iPod.
Yeah, this whole thread is why Hacker News has the "orangesite" reputation it does. I wouldn't have shared anything like this on here, and that is a criticism of HN, not projects like Mercury OS.
I thought this was an interesting project. The site is well-designed. The UI is attractive. As a designer, I really enjoy reading about these things. The fact that this isn't something you'd build your personally customized Linux distro on is not a problem for me. (And no, I don't know the designer or any of his friends. I think the challenge the guy took on was interesting, and I liked reading about it.)
I like HN because of what people share here, but I've never liked the community itself, and this thread is a pretty clear example of why.
No, I said the OS didn't look like something you'd use for heavy-duty development work.
I was being a little sarcastic, but I was just amazed at all the people who spent ten seconds looking at this and said "this is useless, it clearly wouldn't be very good for all the extremely complicated powerful things I want to do. Can it handle fifteen different terminal windows? Fail!!1"
The interesting thing to me is that a compromise is totally feasible and doesn’t need its own OS to accomplish. Let me save a “workflow”.
What is a workflow? A collection of apps, all with their internal states saved, and their positions saved on the screen. Let me close my current flow and open a new flow, with as little friction as possible. I could have an “email” flow in the morning, a “repo 1” flow after that, a “repo 2” flow, (and repo 1+2 etc) a documentation/paper reading flow, and on and on. A few macros can probably accomplish this. Maybe it already exists?
On a more fundamental level the authors are totally right about the debilitating distractions of apps and their damn notifications. But you’d need OS-level control to address that.
I don’t know how to feel about a promising designer only spending 2ish years with ADT and bolting. Perhaps if this work is paired with a personality of similar righteousness, that could be a team issue - otherwise to have someone attempt to do great things and see them immediately (in the relative product roadmap sense) leave, is troubling from the outside.
Being corner stones for conversations means that people are going to talk about things that matters to them, like usability or ability to deploy. These are good things! That's what design studies are supposed to do!
I don't know why you're attempting to discourage this.
It's worth discussing implementation feasibility of product designs. While I think a modern Canon Cat would be awesome, there are reasons why such a device doesn't exist.
For example: When you make a non-dedicated device, you are outsourcing a lot of the functionality to third parties (e.g. via an app-store). This significantly affects the costs of a product launch.
It is well known issue in products that require serious 'design' for human interactions that tech nerds are useless as target audience samples.
In gamedev there are 2 groups of people first is 'game designers' or 'creative direction' and second is - 'tech people'. Best games for wide audience happen when 1st completely ignore 2nd on what needs to be done... And 2nd completely ignore 1st on how invisible bits have to implement it. Often 1st can not iterate properly without code changes on every step and it kills best ideas. I have seen a lot of success when design iterations can be done in no code or very low code environment.
The ability of deployment of an operating (observe the word!) system is paramount and it IS the point here!
Designers should lay off of approaching functional tasks through vague and coined phylosophical mission statements in pace of pragmatism, it is like sawing the coat to the pretty button with esoteric properties.
Forgive me being harsh but I am pretty fed up by the trend in our time when product design is approached like pompous famous fashion designers make weird clothes only suitable for the catwalk and celebrate each other on the otherwise useless piece of textile.
We can instead express creativity and converse ideas through actual usability, we must discuss operating(!) systems through actual usability, through something could be realized and deployed, actually being possible to use for its purpose!
I'm going to disagree with you here. Concepts have their place in the world, one cannot just have pragmatic ideas in a society, nor can you just have idealistic ideas, there must be a balance, they both feed each other.
While those weird clothes by pompous designers can only be worn on the red carpet, they offer cues for things to trickle down to the clothes you and I wear. They're big ideas, exaggerated themes, like an extract, you don't consume the extract alone, you dilute, you mix.
Car concepts are the same, you never see a car's concept version go all the way till production, they're the concept, the idea is to shoot big, dump everything, write it all out, you can edit later.
We've got enough people on this earth that a great many of them can stay up in the clouds as astronauts of ideas, intermittently communicating to us their findings from the vast universe of creativity, with no impact on society's advancement, in fact to great benefit.
I'm always excited to see new OS concepts. It's a shame that there's such a huge amount of work involved in building operating systems, otherwise we might have a lot more options to choose from. Back in the 80s you wrote an OS that supported one or two types of fully integrated computers. Now you're supporting any combination of hardware, much of it requiring proprietary black box drivers that depend on a specific ABI anyway. It's why I don't buy into the idea that people who wrote software in the 80s were ultra low-level wizards or something. They had a significantly easier job and could specialise.
The expectations are just so absurdly high now, it's the same problem in the browser space (which at this point is there a difference between OS and browser).
There isn't a lack of attempts though, there are many tiny OS out in the wild (believe there are like a dozen alone written in Rust) to play around with but many have had to dial back their ambition purely based on hardware support alone.
Okay, consider you have 3 apps: gmail, slack and google docs
In gmail, you have a shipping confirmation, a calendar invite, and a team newsletter.
In slack you have a question from a customer, a review request from the team, and a poll for the next offsite.
And in Docs, you have a new project summary, a budget proposal, and a post-mortem doc.
You see, how you actually have 9 different things to do (intentions), but the number of apps you have is just 3? Sometimes, you'll have a thread of things across multiple apps. So despite switching "apps" there's still mental overhead of piecing things together. It's easy to overlook, but sometimes switching apps can causes an effect like walking into a new room, and forgetting why you were there in the first place. Hurting your focus/flow.
That’s not fair. Context switching often involves a lot more than opening up another tab. And even if it’s not a problem for you, maybe it’s a problem for other people? Or you in the future?
Maybe what I just outlined doesn’t require a new OS but acknowledging the problem seems in line with accepting the most charitable interpretation.
Right. What helps(me) is 12 virtual desktops, one per app so I am single keybind away from anything I need. Not.... whatever this idea is.
I went over the years pretty much from full fledged GNOME/KDE thru light alternatives (XFCE), all the way to nerded out i3 tiling manager + tilda console for the ad-hoc stuff like CLI calculator. And cute little script to display list of .pcap files in /tmp and open wireshark on chosen one coz that's handy for the job
I just observed that most of the usage is "switch between a bunch of full screen apps + starting those" so I cut out the fat.
I don't need icons on desktop, I don't see it most of the day, apps are ran from alt+f2 launcher, few common apps got their own shortcuts, and I have some keybinds to move them between the desktops in that once a month case I need this app on different desktop than usual.
I3 matches apps to desktops by name so if I press caps_lock or hyper_l + 2 I always get firefox, if I press <mod>+4 I always get IDEA etc.
I do realize that's custom customization most people won't bother to do but "distraction-less" OS should aim to do exactly that, get out of the way as much as possible from someone's chosen workflow, not try to shoehorn its own one, and one that seems to love idea of wasting space and minimum information density
I would enjoy some "omni-menu" that is smart enough to figure out whether I want to
* run an app
* run unit conversion/calculator
* search my stuff
* have some shortcuts to add calendar event or todo element or "open ms teams (company cursed me with it) and call person X"
But any existing ones seem to care about look more than functionality and information density so `rofi` is enough.
And that office-adjacent app developers (mostly Microsoft, but Google isn't blameless) stop making integration of anything harder and harder, so stuff that should be nice and easy decades ago (like calendars and todo working from any app) isn't shit.
In all seriousness, emacs is a good example of an environment where "apps" are less siloed and rigid than they are in a typical graphical OS environment. Another is the Unix shell. The idea of creating an environment that achieves the same level of flexibility and empowerment while being modern and graphical and, somehow, accessible to non-programmers… it's not a new idea, but it's a noble one. "Mercury OS" deserves points for at least trying to imagine how it could work, even if there's not much meat on the bone.
According to the "read more" link in the "humane" section(1), this friction seems to happen because the guy who came up with this proposal is painfully ADHD.
I love when design that optimizes the humane experience is being pushed forward. I celebrate this technology ten thousand times happier than the next hyped self serving tech framework.
Microsoft actually tried to do something like this in the mid-1990s with OLE 2.0 and Cairo which was the operating system that was supposed to embody all this.
Basically, instead of applications, the user would focus on documents (kind of like the "spaces" in this). Instead of opening applications, you would invoke "verbs" on different parts of the document.
> With Lisa, Apple presented users with what is generally, but imprecisely, known as a document-oriented paradigm. This is contrasted with program-centric design. The user focuses more on the task to be accomplished than on the tool used to accomplish it. Apple presents tasks, with Lisa, in the form of stationery. Rather than opening LisaWrite, for instance, to begin to do word processing, users initially "tear off stationery", visually, that represents the task of word processing. Either that, or they open an existing LisaWrite document that resembles that stationery. By contrast, the Macintosh and most other GUI systems focus primarily on the program that is used to accomplish a task — directing users to that first.
Ah, yes, the Anti-Me Interface: The kind of interface most likely to make me not use something.
I'm sure it's "well-designed" from a theoretical perspective, and unimpeachable from the perspective of Professional UI/UX Development, but it's so inflexible and non-extensible it comes off as something between a toy and a jail cell. "You will enjoy being productive in this environment focused on channeling productivity to Approved Ends. You will enjoy using Approved Technology in Approved Ways. You will ignore everything beneath the interface, for what the Approved Technology is doing is Approved, and therefore not for you to interfere with."
This title should have a (2019) on it. But I was happy to see this pop up again here, as it’s an increasingly possible and compelling UX for AI agents, where the rest of the chrome and complexity of computing is stripped away to the core actions we really need out of the software we use.
I hope they give this a fresh look and try building it. Lindy looks like a close attempt
I have seen quite a few redesign for fork and knifes for people with disability.
It is also very dismissive, just because current sockets works, it does not mean there is no space for improvement for more secure, or reliable socket, and the way we found out if such thing exist is with design! Like this one...
163 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadMercuryOS – A speculative reimagining of current operating system paradigms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29948455 - Jan 2022 (8 comments)
Introducing Mercury OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20043255 - May 2019 (2 comments)
Mercury OS: Modern, Humane OS Design Concept - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033445 - May 2019 (1 comment)
Mercury OS – A speculative vision of the operating system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033328 - May 2019 (1 comment)
I thought it was a real OS, and wanted to try it, as I've got a Fire tablet gen 1 that is looking for a new use.
Weird question, the credits say Mercury is dedicated to Jef Raskin. Why not have the home screen in the demos say "Good Morning Jef," instead of Jason? Who's Jason?
I'm not affiliated (nor have I actually used it) but it looks like an interesting alternative approach to phone UX, and one that you can actually use!
I'd be interested to hear any stories HNers have with it.
Inmates/asylum cc: dang
In real life, of course, they won't cede that control easily. You'll get the same sort of mess you see on Facebook Marketplace, for example..."for sale" listings of cars that put the down-payment in the sales price spot and some wording telling you to call for more info. No actual prices are shown.
So, it would probably require some sort of unapproved scraping, collating, etc, to really work as intended.
The web lost track after the dotcom. In the beginning there were protocols. Now we're in the corporate moat period, where N corporations build the same thing N times because each one of them wants to dominate the others. Consequently, we were left with low-level protocols and languages (http, html, css, etc); there is no standard for buying shit online, despite most businesses being online. No standard for payments, no standard for query/search/browsing, etc. Compare that with, e.g., computer graphics, where graphics vendors (except Apple) collaborate on the development of standards like OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenXR, and shit works relatively seamlessly modulo vendor bugs and extensions.
What about a PO in an ERP?
Accounting functions? SOmeone adding records toa. general ledger?
editing/viewing a 3d model?
Editing a video? Multitrack audio?
Other comments have stated that this is some student project of some sort. Like many other projects of this type it has failed to consider what most people actually do during the course of their jobs. Worse, it ignores what ‘nerds’ do on their computer while posting on a ‘nerd site’.
There may be a much better world of human-computer interaction lurking in these sorts of ideas but getting out of forty* years of refinement of the window-icon-mouse-pointer paradigm, and forty years of building all sorts of tools and toys within it that are not designed to be decomposed into separate actions usable in any context, is a huge effort.
Or there may not, I feel like people have kept trying to do stuff like this over and over again and we just keep on ending up back in the world of monolithic apps that are entire toolsheds worth of tools, each with their own way to do the same things.
* or more, I am counting from the release of the original Macintosh, please feel free to add on sixteen more years if you'd prefer to count from Englebart's Mother Of All Demos, or forty more if Vannevar Bush's Xanadu feels like the place to put a stake in the sands of time and say "modern computing methods began here".
They’re just designing another tablet UI and renaming everything.
Instead of applications, virtual desktops, and launchers we have “flows, modules, and spaces”
It’d be cool to see more natural language support in OS interfaces though!
"Mercury rejects the Desktop Metaphor and App Ecosystems as fundamentally inhumane. "
2 pages later...
"Every Module can be defined and redefined using its Locus (the action bar). Locus combines the power of a Command-Line Interface with the convenience Natural Language Processing and the discoverability of GUI."
So they reject the inhumaneness of the Desktop metaphor, but replace it with another (Locus - what even does that mean?). At least I know what an action bar is.
Then, it touts itself as a complete replacement of the old paradigms, focused on touch interactivity, but:
"You can tap the Command key to toggle the display of available actions if you are unsure of where to start."
The command key? Is this built for Apple devices only? And if it's touch centric, why do I have a key?
ETA: a way more useful redesign IMO: https://uxdesign.cc/redesigning-siri-and-adding-multitasking...
I like consistency of UI; fluidity at the expense of muscle memory (like having the Windows 11 taskbar centered makes no sense for muscle memory with icons moving about as you open things). The shortcut system sounds laborious.
Pretty? Sure. Practical? Not really.
... or whatever your OS application search is
It's like perpetual chase of "new, inexperienced user", at cost of people using the OS for last 5-10-20 years, and no actual benefit to anyone using it seriously to do work.
That said, I like the concept of this OS design. It reminds me a little of the theoretical concept behind Star Trek’s LCARS interface, where the interface adapts to the user and the task at hand. As a power user I doubt I’d use this myself, unless it could be installed on top of NixOS, but it might be more intuitive and accessible to a more general user base.
It will be hard to get rid of files and folders though, even for general users. As messy as that can get, it’s a simple abstraction burned into just about every human’s brain at this point.
Also if I open too many windows, opening Windows explorer takes 1-2 or more seconds. Something about exhausting GDI handles?
I don't often have more than 30 open, and at that point I start thinking it's excessive and that I should probably tidy up to make sure I actually complete a task rather than get distracted.
The annoying part is just that Windows explorer gets really sluggish -- to a comical degree. For example, I'll do a file operation (copy, rename etc) and it'll take that same explorer Window 5 seconds to register the operation that it itself performed. Meanwhile, Sublime Text open in the background detects it within miliseconds.
I just looked it up, there's a thing called Task View (Win+Tab) which is this big scrolling view of open window thumbnails.
Curiously, Alt+Tab itself is very slow (half a second of lag?) but if I kill explorer.exe I get a different Alt+Tab screen which is extremely responsive.
(And Win+Tab is, of course, much slower than even the slow Alt+Tab...)
I wish I could just leave explore.exe killed, but it makes it a bit harder to do things. Maybe I should do that, to force me to program my own alternatives in Python. (They'd still be faster than what Microsoft made...)
Search function in window names would also be nice... I swear that shit haven't progressed in windows since '95
It's more like a rebellion in a jail block doing time for focus stealing. :)
In I3 at least it just highlights window and workspace if it is not on currently active workspace, instead of switching focus, so you know app wants something but don't get diverter.
Only thing that should be able to is app that you're using opening another window. There is no case focus stealing of different app is desirable and couldn't be just a notification.
I3 tiling WM does it reasonable enough; I use it pretty much in "app per workspace" model (with config auto-putting started app on its designated workflow) and if app on other workspace wants focus it doesn't get it, it just lights up a given workspace and app window; there are also config options to explicitly disable all or some windows from taking focus.
> That said, I like the concept of this OS design. It reminds me a little of the theoretical concept behind Star Trek’s LCARS interface, where the interface adapts to the user and the task at hand. As a power user I doubt I’d use this myself, unless it could be installed on top of NixOS, but it might be more intuitive and accessible to a more general user base.
That idea seems to only work where either you build the interface for yourself, or for a specific narrow set of tasks
"Focused. The clutter we take for granted in today’s operating systems can be overwhelming, especially for folks sensitive to stimulation. Mercury is respectful of limited bandwidths and attention spans."
Still that is fairly far from the OS layer. Microsoft and Apple sell the 'OS' as a bundle with everything (a window manager, file explorer, etc) that you cannot really configure a lot, but that is a problem with their products.
Here's the thing: You are not the target audience of this OS and you are by no means required to use it.
In my opinion, this is a solid attempt at creating an operating system for non-techies. Way fewer concepts to learn, way easier interaction.
This is about as close to designing an operating system as drawing a front cover is to writing a book.
> That thinking is why
What kind of thinking? Acknowledging that writing an OS is a massive undertaking? I have written hobby OS kernels so I'm not speaking hypothetically here. I wasn't suggesting that the UI isn't important either (which is what I believe you were alluding to with your "that thinking" snub), just that the UI is literally just the surface layer in a much deeper stack of technologies -- all of which is important.
> The UI part is harder than the hardware part
Writing device drivers is much harder. The failure modes are much more extreme. No amount of UI polish will improve the user experience if your OS frequently trashes your file system because it doesn't handle buggy storage devices correctly. No amount of UI polish will improve the UX if your platform frequently crashes, or even just doesn't support your hardware at all. And to compound matters, the vast majority of hardware isn't documented either.
So yeah, UI is important but your OS isn't going to win any fans if you don't nail the stacks beneath too.
> [UI's] deals with a piece of diverse, non logical and unpredictable piece of meatware, instead of simple and predictable silicon.
Hardware is often anything but predictable. The fact that it seems that way is a testament to just how well written most operating systems are.
Having lived through 20+ “the year of the Linux desktop”s I can tell you the goal was clearly to become he dominant desktopOS that everyone used.
About that last part… the op was talking about people, it actual hardware, you seem to have missed that. Hardware is in fact predictable, unless it’s failing or just that poorly designed.
Again, Linux isn't an operating system like Windows, macOS or even FreeBSD. Even the broader definition of Linux has it as multiple different collections of different individuals sharing different groups of packages. What one team might aim to do with Linux is very different to what another team might want to do. And "The year of the Linux desktop" wasn't a universal goal by any means. Case in point: I've been using Linux (as well as several flavors of BSD, Macs, Windows and a bunch of other niche platforms that aren't household names) for decades now and I've never once believed Linux should be the dominant desktop. I'm more than happy for it to be 3rd place to Windows and macOS just so long as it retains the flexibility that draws me to use Linux. For me, the appeal of Linux is freedom of choice -- which is the polar opposite of the ideals that a platform would need hold if it were aiming for dominance.
So saying "Linux failed" isn't really a fair comment. A more accurate comment might be that Canonical failed to overtake Windows but you still need to be careful about the term "failed" given that millions of regular users would be viewed as successful by most peoples standards -- even if it didn't succeed at some impossible ideology of a desktop monopoly.
> About that last part… the op was talking about people, it actual hardware, you seem to have missed that.
No i got that. It's you who missed the following part:
> Hardware is in fact predictable, unless it’s failing or just that poorly designed.
Don't underestimate just how much hardware out there is buggy, doesn't follow specifications correctly, old and failing, or just isn't used correctly by users correctly (eg people yanking USB storage devices without safely unmounting them first). The reality is that hardware can be very unpredictable yet operating systems still need to handle that gracefully.
The market is flooded with mechanical HDDs from reputable manufacturers which don't follow specifications correctly because those devices can fake higher throughput by sending successful write messages back to the OS even when the drives are still caching those writes. Or cheap flash storage that fails often. And hot pluggable devices in the form of USB and Thunderbolt have only exasperated the problem because now you have devices that can be connected and disconnected without any warning.
Then you have problems that power saving introduces. You now have an OS with hardware that shouldn't be connected and disconnected yet still able to power that on and off gracefully (otherwise your OS is borderline useless on any laptop).
...and all of this is without even considering external conditions (ie the physical nature of hardware -- the reason it's called "hardware"). From mechanical failures, hardware getting old, dusty, dropped etc. Through to unlikely but still real world problems like "cosmic bit-flips".
Now imagine trying to implement all of this via reverse engineering - because device manufacturers are only going to support Windows, maybe macOS and, if you're lucky, Linux. And imagine trying to implement that for hundreds of different hardware types, getting each one stable. Even just testing across that range of hardware is a difficult enough problem on its own.
There's a reason BeOS-clone Haiku support FreeBSD network drivers, SkyOS's user land was eventually ported to Linux, and Linux (for a time at least) supported Windows WiFi drivers. It isn't because developers are lazy -- it's because this is a fscking hard problem to solve. And lets be clear, using another OS's driver model isn't an easy thing to implement itself.
Frankly put: fact that you think hardware is easy and predictable is proof of the success of Linux (and...
To come back on topic. I wasn't saying hardware is unpredictable per se -- just that it often behaves unpredictably. And I say that because there are a set of expectations which, in reality, hardware doesn't always follow.
However the predictability of humans vs hardware is a somewhat moot point because that's only part of the story for why writing hardware-interfacing code is harder than human interfaces. I did discuss cover a few of those other reasons too but you seem fixated on the predictability of the interfaces.
Now you can walk around telling every grandma that they should not refer to it as OS, but you will unlikely succeed in that mission. Accept it...
But we are technical people talking about OS design. So I don’t really understand your point.
My point is that you produced dozens of paragraphs about terminology but added zero value to the actual discussion and all that while totally understanding what others actually meant.
Tech news sure. But not in average peoples news. Or at the very most, only on special tech segments. Either way, definitely not frequent.
> My point is that you produced dozens of paragraphs about terminology but added zero value to the actual discussion
I was discussing the complexities of writing hardware drivers after it was stated that it’s easier than UIs.
Where’s the value in your comments here? You are adding nothing, just arguing for the sake of arguing.
> all that while totally understanding what others actually meant.
“Misunderstanding” I assume you meant (given the context of your comments). Either way, and as I said to the other commenter (though I’m not convinced you two aren’t shill accounts for the same person given your writing styles are the same), I did understand. I just disagreed and cited some experience I had to back up my points of view.
I don’t really understand your problem here. This is a tech forum and we are talking about operating system development. Yet you’re begrudging me having a technical conversation about operating system development.
I would much prefer a world where we empower people to actually learn about the tools they use, rather than one in which we jump through hoops in order to try and design around predictions about what we think "they" want when, in reality, it's like trying to hit a billion different targets with a single dart.
We should be reaching for designs that give tools to and enable people to achieve that which they can think up with their own free will and imagination, not predictive trash that more often than not simply results in annoying the user with something that is, at best, close but not close enough to what they want to actually be useful, leaving them with the frustration of not being able to do anything about it.
It's not, stop being offended on behalf of others. "non-xxx" is as neutral as it can be to refer to a population.
And it does make sense to give different end products to techies and non-techies, because the needs are wildly different.
Personally, I would like some sort of "personal workspaces". Sort of virtual desktops that were project-oriented.
I would like switch to a project, find all my notes, emails, lists, files and more (terminal windows? web browsing/tabs? apps?) in that environment.
and when I run out of time, shut it down. Next time I switch to it, all my context is right there, ready to jump in.
could be some combination of fast-user-switching, virtual desktops, containers, vms, don't know? but unified.
Fuck.
I don’t use the workspace feature on the Mac, I assume they’re recovered as well.
Obviously applications need to be restart aware as well. I really like how the provided Mac apps (Pages, Numbers, etc. ) work with the first class document model in the system. I have dozens of Untitled documents across apps, some are years old. Never “saved” them. They just exist. Across reboots, app upgrades, and OS upgrades.
I wish more apps embraced my lazy house keeping.
I don’t know how the documents sync across devices, if at all.
I wanted to mimic the OS document model in Java with my own app, but that’s easier said than done.
I tried it, but it is just not there yet. My use case is switching between 3d cad design and printing apps (browser, slicer, notes) and between coding (jetbrains ide’s, terminal, browser, draw.io app)
And when i switch from design to getting into the production stage, it should make the slicer module more prominent. Cad design usually are tweaks after this.
Cf: The Anti-Mac Interface, for a bit of a tonic
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/
Me too but to be fair, we would probably call this a desktop environment, not an OS. It's a shell that could run on top of Windows, MacOS or Linux. Data could be stored in a standard filesystem or a database and managed by the shell and presented to users as "content and actions [...] fluidly assembled based on your intentions"
That said, it's absolutely valid to question stuff like this. A lot of design student type stuff miss HUGE usability issues.
1. Title
2. Screenshot
3. "Mercury is a speculative reimagining ..."
1. “Art direction” is the second tab. There’s no technical components, no installation info, no GitHub.
2. Jason Yuan Design in the footer. So clearly some kind of UX person/group built this, not a hacker collective.
3. Flowery UX-heavy language and the absence of concrete features. Focusing on the “what” rather than the “how”.
Local optimization for your existing workflow is not the intended goal of this exploratory project.
I get a lot of value from HN, but technocratic communities often fail to understand the value of reimagining everyday things.
They sometimes get so caught up in the technical bits and pieces they don't like about something you end up with responses like those you in this discussion, or HN's reaction to Dropbox, or Shallots Slashdot's reaction to the iPod.
I thought this was an interesting project. The site is well-designed. The UI is attractive. As a designer, I really enjoy reading about these things. The fact that this isn't something you'd build your personally customized Linux distro on is not a problem for me. (And no, I don't know the designer or any of his friends. I think the challenge the guy took on was interesting, and I liked reading about it.)
I like HN because of what people share here, but I've never liked the community itself, and this thread is a pretty clear example of why.
I was being a little sarcastic, but I was just amazed at all the people who spent ten seconds looking at this and said "this is useless, it clearly wouldn't be very good for all the extremely complicated powerful things I want to do. Can it handle fifteen different terminal windows? Fail!!1"
Or maybe I'm just old and words no longer mean things the way that I am used to interpreting.
What is a workflow? A collection of apps, all with their internal states saved, and their positions saved on the screen. Let me close my current flow and open a new flow, with as little friction as possible. I could have an “email” flow in the morning, a “repo 1” flow after that, a “repo 2” flow, (and repo 1+2 etc) a documentation/paper reading flow, and on and on. A few macros can probably accomplish this. Maybe it already exists?
On a more fundamental level the authors are totally right about the debilitating distractions of apps and their damn notifications. But you’d need OS-level control to address that.
I don't know why you're attempting to discourage this.
For example: When you make a non-dedicated device, you are outsourcing a lot of the functionality to third parties (e.g. via an app-store). This significantly affects the costs of a product launch.
In gamedev there are 2 groups of people first is 'game designers' or 'creative direction' and second is - 'tech people'. Best games for wide audience happen when 1st completely ignore 2nd on what needs to be done... And 2nd completely ignore 1st on how invisible bits have to implement it. Often 1st can not iterate properly without code changes on every step and it kills best ideas. I have seen a lot of success when design iterations can be done in no code or very low code environment.
Designers should lay off of approaching functional tasks through vague and coined phylosophical mission statements in pace of pragmatism, it is like sawing the coat to the pretty button with esoteric properties.
Forgive me being harsh but I am pretty fed up by the trend in our time when product design is approached like pompous famous fashion designers make weird clothes only suitable for the catwalk and celebrate each other on the otherwise useless piece of textile.
We can instead express creativity and converse ideas through actual usability, we must discuss operating(!) systems through actual usability, through something could be realized and deployed, actually being possible to use for its purpose!
While those weird clothes by pompous designers can only be worn on the red carpet, they offer cues for things to trickle down to the clothes you and I wear. They're big ideas, exaggerated themes, like an extract, you don't consume the extract alone, you dilute, you mix.
Car concepts are the same, you never see a car's concept version go all the way till production, they're the concept, the idea is to shoot big, dump everything, write it all out, you can edit later.
We've got enough people on this earth that a great many of them can stay up in the clouds as astronauts of ideas, intermittently communicating to us their findings from the vast universe of creativity, with no impact on society's advancement, in fact to great benefit.
Just my 2 cents
There isn't a lack of attempts though, there are many tiny OS out in the wild (believe there are like a dozen alone written in Rust) to play around with but many have had to dial back their ambition purely based on hardware support alone.
Please tell me why my workflow, which works for me, sucks more. What is this magical 'friction'?
Reads like it was written by an MBA.
In gmail, you have a shipping confirmation, a calendar invite, and a team newsletter.
In slack you have a question from a customer, a review request from the team, and a poll for the next offsite.
And in Docs, you have a new project summary, a budget proposal, and a post-mortem doc.
You see, how you actually have 9 different things to do (intentions), but the number of apps you have is just 3? Sometimes, you'll have a thread of things across multiple apps. So despite switching "apps" there's still mental overhead of piecing things together. It's easy to overlook, but sometimes switching apps can causes an effect like walking into a new room, and forgetting why you were there in the first place. Hurting your focus/flow.
Also OS doesn't fix any of that, especially for the webapps as they tend to not integrate well with anything else
Maybe what I just outlined doesn’t require a new OS but acknowledging the problem seems in line with accepting the most charitable interpretation.
I went over the years pretty much from full fledged GNOME/KDE thru light alternatives (XFCE), all the way to nerded out i3 tiling manager + tilda console for the ad-hoc stuff like CLI calculator. And cute little script to display list of .pcap files in /tmp and open wireshark on chosen one coz that's handy for the job
I just observed that most of the usage is "switch between a bunch of full screen apps + starting those" so I cut out the fat.
I don't need icons on desktop, I don't see it most of the day, apps are ran from alt+f2 launcher, few common apps got their own shortcuts, and I have some keybinds to move them between the desktops in that once a month case I need this app on different desktop than usual.
I3 matches apps to desktops by name so if I press caps_lock or hyper_l + 2 I always get firefox, if I press <mod>+4 I always get IDEA etc.
I do realize that's custom customization most people won't bother to do but "distraction-less" OS should aim to do exactly that, get out of the way as much as possible from someone's chosen workflow, not try to shoehorn its own one, and one that seems to love idea of wasting space and minimum information density
I would enjoy some "omni-menu" that is smart enough to figure out whether I want to
* run an app * run unit conversion/calculator * search my stuff * have some shortcuts to add calendar event or todo element or "open ms teams (company cursed me with it) and call person X"
But any existing ones seem to care about look more than functionality and information density so `rofi` is enough.
And that office-adjacent app developers (mostly Microsoft, but Google isn't blameless) stop making integration of anything harder and harder, so stuff that should be nice and easy decades ago (like calendars and todo working from any app) isn't shit.
1: https://uxdesign.cc/introducing-mercury-os-f4de45a04289
Basically, instead of applications, the user would focus on documents (kind of like the "spaces" in this). Instead of opening applications, you would invoke "verbs" on different parts of the document.
It reminds me a bit of the Apple Lisa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa
> With Lisa, Apple presented users with what is generally, but imprecisely, known as a document-oriented paradigm. This is contrasted with program-centric design. The user focuses more on the task to be accomplished than on the tool used to accomplish it. Apple presents tasks, with Lisa, in the form of stationery. Rather than opening LisaWrite, for instance, to begin to do word processing, users initially "tear off stationery", visually, that represents the task of word processing. Either that, or they open an existing LisaWrite document that resembles that stationery. By contrast, the Macintosh and most other GUI systems focus primarily on the program that is used to accomplish a task — directing users to that first.
I'm sure it's "well-designed" from a theoretical perspective, and unimpeachable from the perspective of Professional UI/UX Development, but it's so inflexible and non-extensible it comes off as something between a toy and a jail cell. "You will enjoy being productive in this environment focused on channeling productivity to Approved Ends. You will enjoy using Approved Technology in Approved Ways. You will ignore everything beneath the interface, for what the Approved Technology is doing is Approved, and therefore not for you to interfere with."
Cf: The Anti-Mac Interface, for a bit of a tonic
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/
Stay in your lanes, designers! Humanity cannot improve on the taskbar/window configuration for any use case, ever.
I have seen quite a few redesign for fork and knifes for people with disability. It is also very dismissive, just because current sockets works, it does not mean there is no space for improvement for more secure, or reliable socket, and the way we found out if such thing exist is with design! Like this one...