Top bar doesn't have any kind of background on Windows. Is that intentional?
Mercury OS
91–100 of 165 posts
Re: Mercury OS
#92OS design is in an interesting place right now. I feel like it's impossible to have a device experience that caters to everyone. The vast majority of users don't consciously register that they are using a computer with an operating system. Most don't know there are differences between tablets, laptops and phones. Most don't understand the concept of a file or a folder - "photos" are in "iCloud" and "documents" in "go…
That productivity OS for power users does exist. It's free and you can even run Windows games in it now.
Haha I know, I run Linux dual booted 50/50 with Windows now and often game on it.
It still has a lot of janky behaviour though - like Chrome tabs on Wayland not being draggable (off/on the window), no dark mode support on Chrome, workspaces per monitor don't exist and I have yet to find a terminal emulator as nice as iTerm2.
All-in-all though, I am pretty happy with it and will continue to use it. Happy to see a growing focus on desktop usability and hope to see that continue to grow in the near future
Re: Mercury OS
#93I knew, as soon as this "OS" title didn't lead to a Unix-like general purpose OS, that there would be a lot of shitting on it. Stay in your lanes, designers! Humanity cannot improve on the taskbar/window configuration for any use case, ever.
Maybe designers should research why we are not redesigning things like power sockets, forks, knives, shoelaces every other month.
One could call the desktop environment (OS frontend) an appliance, and we certainly redesign appliances and scheduling software frequently.
Re: Mercury OS
#94This 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.
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.…
Sounds like this is pretty doable in Linux with some tinkering
Re: Mercury OS
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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?
Re: Mercury OS
#96The author mentions being inspired by Jef Raskin. His book The Humane Interface is fantastic, and as relevant as ever.
Re: Mercury OS
#97It's like whoever designed this doesn't know the meaning of Operating System.
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Re: Mercury OS
#98Just 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…
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.
Re: Mercury OS
#99I'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 AB…
Well, you wouldn't need to write whole new kernel/drivers/etc. to implement this design.
Re: Mercury OS
#100This 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.
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.…
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)