Please tell me why my workflow, which works for me, sucks more. What is this magical 'friction'?
Reads like it was written by an MBA.
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.
Also OS doesn't fix any of that, especially for the webapps as they tend to not integrate well with anything else
Maybe what I just outlined doesn’t require a new OS but acknowledging the problem seems in line with accepting the most charitable interpretation.
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.