[ryanq_do]

The design document is 11 years old. Symphony has been a solo side project for the last 6-7 years with a release once or twice a year. There are a few more recent updates on the project's facebook page including screenshots of the new build in progress. https://www.facebook.com/SymphonyOS/

[david-given]

Are there any videos of the new Mezzo in action?

It occurs to me that my post was unduly dismissive. I totally believe that most modern UIs are horribly broken, and I completely sympathise with the 'burn it all down!' approach. But forcing everybody to change their workflow because reasons is, I believe, not it. (Though I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise.)

[ryanq_do]

Many of the concepts we built into Symphony have since become common in major desktop and mobile environments such as fullscreen menus and hot corners. The project started in 2004 when I as a web developer wanted to start playing in the Desktop space and decided to give it a shot with the tools I knew. These days it's a personal side project that I wish I had more time for. I do not have any videos of the new build in action, just the screenshots on the project's facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SymphonyOS/ I'll see what I can do about that this weekend when I am back into it. The new build is coming together but I am not trying to convince anyone that this is what they should use. It's a fun personal hobby at least until more developers get involved.

[david-given]

Mmm.

I loathe hot corners; every day or so I accidentally lock the screen on my work macbook because when I fling the mouse pointer out of the way of what I'm looking at it hits a corner.

I also loathe full-screen menus. Screens are big, and having the entire contents of my screen be replaced with an information-heavy overlay is a non-trivial perceptual context switch which instantly causes me to lose my place in what I was doing. You underestimate how cheap a right-click menu selection can be; press, drag a small distance down, let go. And if the app's designed properly you can right click anywhere.

(Which, to be honest, most apps aren't. I grew up on RISC OS, which was driven entirely by context menus, and did this stuff right --- each app was a single context target. Modern apps have different contexts for every tiny UI element. Web browsers are particularly bad; I can't count the number of time I've done 'Open in new tab' rather than 'Back' because the mouse just happened to be on a link rather than a text area.)

My point is: one size doesn't fit all.

[arm]

You know you can change the function of the hot corner (or simply disable it), right?

(In case you don’t know how: go to System Preferences → Desktop & Screen Saver → Screen Saver → Hot Corners…)

[tracker1]

Silly question, the site notes the OS works on a low-memory platform, but the only download seems to be x64... Any plans for other release platforms rPI, oPI, etc?

[ryanq_do]

It's absolutely possible but just a matter of available time/resources to support additional architectures. Prior to the latest release it was x86 only. The components of the desktop environment are fully portable since a lot of it is interpreted rather than compiled and the Mezzo desktop does run well on the rPI.