[rpeden]

I enjoy this kind of creative exploration.

I get a lot of value from HN, but technocratic communities often fail to understand the value of reimagining everyday things.

They sometimes get so caught up in the technical bits and pieces they don't like about something you end up with responses like those you in this discussion, or HN's reaction to Dropbox, or Shallots Slashdot's reaction to the iPod.

[_zzaw]

Yeah, this whole thread is why Hacker News has the "orangesite" reputation it does. I wouldn't have shared anything like this on here, and that is a criticism of HN, not projects like Mercury OS.

I thought this was an interesting project. The site is well-designed. The UI is attractive. As a designer, I really enjoy reading about these things. The fact that this isn't something you'd build your personally customized Linux distro on is not a problem for me. (And no, I don't know the designer or any of his friends. I think the challenge the guy took on was interesting, and I liked reading about it.)

I like HN because of what people share here, but I've never liked the community itself, and this thread is a pretty clear example of why.

[ungamedplayer]

Why wouldnt you build this on Linux?

[_zzaw]

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"

[ungamedplayer]

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.

[janalsncm]

The interesting thing to me is that a compromise is totally feasible and doesn’t need its own OS to accomplish. Let me save a “workflow”.

What is a workflow? A collection of apps, all with their internal states saved, and their positions saved on the screen. Let me close my current flow and open a new flow, with as little friction as possible. I could have an “email” flow in the morning, a “repo 1” flow after that, a “repo 2” flow, (and repo 1+2 etc) a documentation/paper reading flow, and on and on. A few macros can probably accomplish this. Maybe it already exists?

On a more fundamental level the authors are totally right about the debilitating distractions of apps and their damn notifications. But you’d need OS-level control to address that.