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.
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.
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"
Or maybe I'm just old and words no longer mean things the way that I am used to interpreting.
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.
That said, it's absolutely valid to question stuff like this. A lot of design student type stuff miss HUGE usability issues.
1. Title
2. Screenshot
3. "Mercury is a speculative reimagining ..."
1. “Art direction” is the second tab. There’s no technical components, no installation info, no GitHub.
2. Jason Yuan Design in the footer. So clearly some kind of UX person/group built this, not a hacker collective.
3. Flowery UX-heavy language and the absence of concrete features. Focusing on the “what” rather than the “how”.
Local optimization for your existing workflow is not the intended goal of this exploratory project.
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.
For example: When you make a non-dedicated device, you are outsourcing a lot of the functionality to third parties (e.g. via an app-store). This significantly affects the costs of a product launch.
Designers should lay off of approaching functional tasks through vague and coined phylosophical mission statements in pace of pragmatism, it is like sawing the coat to the pretty button with esoteric properties.
Forgive me being harsh but I am pretty fed up by the trend in our time when product design is approached like pompous famous fashion designers make weird clothes only suitable for the catwalk and celebrate each other on the otherwise useless piece of textile.
We can instead express creativity and converse ideas through actual usability, we must discuss operating(!) systems through actual usability, through something could be realized and deployed, actually being possible to use for its purpose!
While those weird clothes by pompous designers can only be worn on the red carpet, they offer cues for things to trickle down to the clothes you and I wear. They're big ideas, exaggerated themes, like an extract, you don't consume the extract alone, you dilute, you mix.
Car concepts are the same, you never see a car's concept version go all the way till production, they're the concept, the idea is to shoot big, dump everything, write it all out, you can edit later.
We've got enough people on this earth that a great many of them can stay up in the clouds as astronauts of ideas, intermittently communicating to us their findings from the vast universe of creativity, with no impact on society's advancement, in fact to great benefit.
Just my 2 cents
I don't know why you're attempting to discourage this.