[catchmeifyoucan]

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.

[ilyt]

.... so from MBA that also doesn't know browser tabs exist.

Also OS doesn't fix any of that, especially for the webapps as they tend to not integrate well with anything else

[janalsncm]

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.

[ilyt]

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.

[BearOso]

So just add all the apps' functions to emacs and we're golden. Got it.

[comex]

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.

[ungamedplayer]

This is my approach.