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.
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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."
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.
I still have no fucking idea how alt-tab logic works in windows. It's definitely not in order of recency...
Search function in window names would also be nice... I swear that shit haven't progressed in windows since '95
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 ?
Real question is why I'm still using Windows ;)
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.
>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
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.
The window popping up anyway, but in the background and without focus, and in a way that freezes the foreground, isn't the answer to focus stealing.
It's more like a rebellion in a jail block doing time for focus stealing. :)
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.
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".
No, no, we need to connect microphone to telemetry so we can hear user yelling "fuck off" at the features
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 disgusting and patronizing honestly.
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.
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.
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."
That's because this OS is a speculative puff piece by a UI designer looking to drum up some business.
I don't know why you people are so touched about somebody's attempt at redesigning an OS.
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.
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.
> I think the entire concept of "non-techies" is condescending to the people you're referring to
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.
They’re not redesigning an OS. They are describing a theoretical UI.
This is about as close to designing an operating system as drawing a front cover is to writing a book.
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.
This is yet another thing that non-techies sincerely don't care about. For them, it is the OS.
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...
Non-techies don’t wouldn’t even have heard the term OS before, let alone know whether the post above is an OS or not.
But we are technical people talking about OS design. So I don’t really understand your point.
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.
Not sure about the non-techies part. He wants to replace icons by command line interface and voice recognition.
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."
I would go in a different direction too.
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.
MacOS can do this, it is called stage manager.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213315
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.
+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.
Fuck.
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.
KDE Plasma has something like this called "Activities" Check it out.
Sounds like this is pretty doable in Linux with some tinkering
Not even tinkering, KDE has this builtin.
KDE tried something like that in KDE 4 but it wasn't well received so they toned it down in KDE 5.
You can do that in fvwm .
Since 20 years.
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
> 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"
I agree, but to be fair, the vast majority of this stuff is very high level window manager and UI framework features.
What would you change compared to Android to improve "let me choose the application I want and run it?"
what could be easier than "tapping on an icon with my index finger"?
Cmd + D > Fuzzy search
... or whatever your OS application search is