Mercury OS • Hacker News Board

Re: Mercury OS

#161

Post by ilyt » Tue, May 02, 2023, 11:03 PM UTC

SkyMarshal wrote: post #77

ilyt wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

>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

Re: Mercury OS

#162

Post by ilyt » Tue, May 02, 2023, 11:05 PM UTC

andai wrote: post #114

happymellon wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What you're doing with them ? Even on browser tabs I usually (I have vertical tabs addon so it is on the side of the screen) stop when I have full tabbar.

Re: Mercury OS

#163

Post by ilyt » Tue, May 02, 2023, 11:06 PM UTC

MarkSweep wrote: post #90

scrubs wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: Mercury OS

#164

Post by ilyt » Tue, May 02, 2023, 11:08 PM UTC

juunpp wrote: post #71

scrubs wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

Re: Mercury OS

#165

Post by ungamedplayer » Sat, May 06, 2023, 11:30 PM UTC

_zzaw wrote: post #145

ungamedplayer wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldnt you build this on Linux?

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"

I don't actually see any os at all on this site. I see a ui design idea. Hence my assumption that you don't build your s on top of an os.

Or maybe I'm just old and words no longer mean things the way that I am used to interpreting.