Are there any operating system designed to be as distraction free as possible?
Without internet access, as few programs as possible and with a layout that is designed to be boring.
What work are you trying to do? Because “Without internet access, as few programs as possible and with a layout that is designed to be boring.”
Looks like conditions that could be met with a piece of paper - not being sarcastic - sometimes a computer is too much of a distraction and sketching out an idea or writing a first draft on paper is massivly beneficial to overall productivity.
Im interested in structuring information. So for example editing text, using spreadsheets or mindmapping.
Well then I’d go for a live iso like tailsOS with persistent storage option. That way you boot into it for “focus time” and don’t set it up the network connection.
not a bad idea. Kali, from what I recall, has a much prettier UI though. You can use a solid wallpaper, of course, or make your own wallpaper with things you need to remember listed. your apps will cover it up, but ctrl+alt+d will get you desktop. I have Debian with KDE, too, because it is easier than most others to add and delete sutff. KDE is very bloated, so you’ll need to delete a lot of stuff. I really love AntiX (Debian-bsed, but a bit harder since it has a separate repository) and it is so light that it still works well on a cheap 2.0 flahs drive. there are even lighter version (core, I think), but those take a lot more work to set up. Test out a few on flashdrives with persistence set up - before installing on a hard drive. The guy who mentioned terminal was right, though. More and more, I am finding terminal (for some things) better. I use a separate work space just for tmux and use mpv --no-video for music to drown out roommates, ranger in a few panes with micro editor customized, htop to close mpv when it misbehaves… There seem to be many autistic computerphiles, so you might also ask in their forums.
Check out FreeDOS. It ships a text editor. You can find more than one spreadsheet application on archive.org. I’m not sure about mind maps though. Also, internet works if you want it to but it’s totally optional.
You can configure NixOS to have as little or as much as you want by setting the right options. Arch allows customising to a similar level but that’s less… configuring and more installing things and tweaking stuff here and there.
10000 options whoa. Is there a howto you’d recommend for navigating those? Or maybe an example config if I want the experience limited to a text editor and an nfs mount.
The default configuration generated by
nixos-generate-config
is a good starting point. From there you can probably find more things to disable or trim down.environment.systemPackages
andenvironment.defaultPackages
for example are lists you can make very short.
i3 window manager in Linux is super minimalistic
Sounds kinda like TempleOS to me
The UI is far from boring in TempleOS lmao
I love linux with XFCE
for mobile: graphene OS, or completely vanilla android ( lineageOS )
There’s https://www.mercuryos.com/
Mercury OS is a speculative vision designed to question the paradigms governing human-computer interaction today.
Very interesting, but is it still under development?
no, it’s purely a concept. there aren’t any plans i could find to actually build a functional os
Copyright 2019 Jason Yuan Design. All rights reserved.
not open source thought
Oh, interesting. Adding this to my watch list.
The last OS that I used without an Internet connection was Slackware.
I’ll go with Linux and just configure it properly. Depending on what you want you could even not have a DE/WM
I’ve been exploring vr for this exact purpose. Still have a lot of work to do on the best environment I found but it’s coming together.
Virtual reality?
Yep, one thing about a headset is that it monopolizes your vision and if you can build the virtual environment, you can choose what is and isn’t there. After getting bored with the apps and games on the Quest I decided to explore the most basic part of it, the home environments. In that environment it’s possible to open up multiple browsers so I opened one to a CryptoPad, connected a bluetooth keyboard and simply sat there noting problems with the environment and experience.
Since then, I found an app/framework called Lovr that enabled me to build the environment I want in Lua and to chip away at the issues I found. Forked a virtual development environment called indeck to suit my needs here https://github.com/weex/indeck/issues
Terminal
/snark
Even xterm is too distracting with
mpv --vo=tct --really-quiet "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"
:PAnd of course it’s Rick Astley lol
Haha, should have gone with:
mpv --vo=tct --really-quiet $(echo aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cueW91dHViZS5jb20vd2F0Y2g/dj1kUXc0dzlXZ1hjUQ== | base64 -d -)
Not an OS and maybe not ‘boring’ to use, but checkout the tools from https://suckless.org/
Using KDE Activities (available on any Linux OS), you can create a setup like this
you can easily configure a Linux system to be like this
FreeBSD
WTF, spartanic features and UI, without internet, for this I turn off the PC and done. You can customize EVERY OS to be as distraccion free as you like, even Windows if you want.