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on Gopher (inofficial)
(HTM) Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
(HTM) VitruvianOS â Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS
pelasaco wrote 10 hours 0 min ago:
systemd based?
markus_zhang wrote 13 hours 29 min ago:
Tangible:
Talking about BeOS, this is the most fantastic piece of technological
fiction I read about:
(HTM) [1]: https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue4-8.htm...
ginkgotree wrote 15 hours 25 min ago:
I installed BeOS in the 90s as a kid. It was awesome, and I love seeing
this.
a-dub wrote 16 hours 46 min ago:
does preempt_rt actually confer a ui responsiveness benefit on
multicore systems?
voidfunc wrote 17 hours 17 min ago:
Very interesting. Wonder if this can run Proton for gaming... this
looks about perfect.
0x80h wrote 17 hours 17 min ago:
This is pure nostalgia. What a fantastic time playing with BeOS :)
kev009 wrote 19 hours 6 min ago:
This is both ambitious and seemingly not intractable which is a rare
goldilocks combination.
As some contrast, consider something like GNUStep. You are never going
to get macOS out of GNUStep, no matter how hard you try, because it is
too high level (Cocoa) while simultaneously too ambitious. Similarly,
with alternate kernels like ReactOS you will never get full replacement
of Windows because it is too ambitious and intractable.
The intersection of this project though, it is a cunning insight in
using the hardware support of Linux and shedding the graphics layer for
something a lot simpler with a minimal kernel module to support the
existing mechanics of BeOS. This is more in line with wine, which is
and has been useful for a long time, but is even easier. This doesn't
mean it will achieve massive user base, but it seems like it will
mature fast enough into something dedicated fans can enjoy and use
productively.
ranger_danger wrote 20 hours 3 min ago:
Cosmoe, a similar project that supports running Haiku apps on Linux,
has also been recently revived after 18 years: [1] There is also a
library version where you can use the Haiku API to write Linux apps.
I do have to say... in all my years of software development, as far as
system APIs go, BeOS/Haiku has by far been the most pleasant and
easy-to-use API I have ever seen, so this is a very welcome addition
for me.
(HTM) [1]: https://pappp.net/?p=95060
radiator wrote 21 hours 11 min ago:
what weâve actually created is an alternative Linux desktop that uses
neither X nor Wayland, this is very welcome news, since X is allegedly
"abandonware" and of course not everybody likes wayland.
Redster wrote 23 hours 2 min ago:
I'm not getting enough sleep. I read this as ViltrumiteOS. I haven't
even watched Invincibles.
egorfine wrote 1 day ago:
With age verification built in, right? right?
mac3n wrote 1 day ago:
My favorite thing about the early BeBox was the Pulse CPU meter, which
shows the load on each of the two CPU chips. Clicking on a CPU stopped
it. Clicking on the second stopped it as well, which took me a moment
to realize.
vibbix wrote 1 day ago:
Pleasant surprise to hear about this. I've had a fascination with BeOS
& Haiku for decades. I am now actually developing a custom website
layout themed after BeOS (good excuse to learn Figma!)
nathell wrote 1 day ago:
I almost overlooked this, and then when I didnât, I almost dismissed
this as Yet Another Linux Distro with a custom skin. But no, thereâs
novelty and exploration in here. Thereâs attempt to venture off the
local maximum. This is a breath of fresh air.
kriro wrote 1 day ago:
My favorite part of BeOS is the file system. The book can be found
freely here:
(HTM) [1]: https://www.nobius.org/dbg/
weli wrote 1 day ago:
Is this using haiku as a kernel or is it a complete re-implementation
of BeOs/Haiku API's? I can't tell by their website or github.
flippyhead wrote 1 day ago:
Even if the cheaps are weak... is the code strong?
_spduchamp wrote 1 day ago:
BeOS had the BEST icons.
Findecanor wrote 1 day ago:
Haiku's are even better. They have been remade in a scalable vector
graphics format, but one that is still very compact: often smaller
than the comparable pixmap.
(HTM) [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40196333
rubymamis wrote 1 day ago:
Can someone list what are some cool/novel BeOS features that other OSes
didnât have at the time and maybe still donât have?
numerio wrote 1 day ago:
Thank you everyone for commenting! We are going to pubblish small
articles on the website to clarify some of the common questions that
are popping around. We will also do our best to improve our wording and
marketing, thanks everyone for the suggestions and stay tuned!
aryonoco wrote 1 day ago:
Little known fact, a small piece of BeOS survives to this day and is an
integral part of Android
BeOS came up with âBinderâ for doing inter process communication.
Just before Be Inc. was acquired by Palm, some Be engineers somehow
convinced management to release Binder as open source, which came to be
known as OpenBinder.
After the Palm acquisition many Be engineers moved to a startup called
Android Inc, and adopted OpenBinder for IPC. And the rest as they say,
is history.
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
Another thing that survives is that they wrote Java as if writing C++
with m_ prefixes, and several other Cisms, which prevail to today.
prmoustache wrote 1 day ago:
Anyone remember BlueEyedOS? It had exactly the main goal, building a
beos compatible OS on top of the Linux kernel.
lproven wrote 2 hours 48 min ago:
A later successor was Cosmoe: [1] This has evolved into a new UI
layer for Wayland, on top of Linux... [2] I wrote about it last year:
(HTM) [1]: https://gitlab.com/haydentech/cosmoe-classic/
(HTM) [2]: https://cosmoe.org/index.html
(HTM) [3]: https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/25/cosmoe_new_cpp_toolki...
hencq wrote 1 day ago:
Yes! I was racking my brain trying to remember what it was called.
Back in the early 2000s I ran BeOS on my desktop and absolutely loved
it. Then when they went under, I followed the effort to come up with
an open source version with guest interest. There was one effort that
wanted to build everything from scratch. That's what was later
renamed into Haiku (I think initially openBeOS maybe?). There was
also BlueEyedOS who thought you could get there faster by building on
Linux and X11.
I think Haiku got more traction because at the time people felt that
it should run BeOS software without recompiling. I have long wondered
what would have happened if BlueEyedOS would have gotten most of the
effort.
tecleandor wrote 1 day ago:
Related interview with VitruvianOS dev:
(HTM) [1]: https://www.desktoponfire.com/interview/846/an-interview-with-...
carlesfe wrote 1 day ago:
I ran BeOS as a daily driver for a few months in the early 2000s. I had
a winmodem and Linux couldn't connect to the internet for me, but for
some reason, BeOS had drivers, so I used it. It was faster and the
desktop environment felt more polished than KDE/Gnome.
Of course, at that time, it was impossible to know which OS would win
the wars, so BeOS became my favorite. However, Linux developed very
quickly during those years, I got into college and started using UNIX
there, winmodem drivers appeared, and that's what I ended up using.
But BeOS still holds a very dear place in my heart. It really was
superior to anything else during that era.
dainiusse wrote 1 day ago:
+1. Even though it had limitations, it had this "clean polished
feeling"
hypercube33 wrote 1 day ago:
What set it apart was the out of the way UX and clean fast
experience. It was a real time kernal to boot. I think korg used it
on some of their synth products or something even.
To me the UX and experience on it was (still) ahead of its time. It
ran stuff on a Pentium 90 like it was a 400mhz beast running NT.
vanderZwan wrote 1 day ago:
Sort-of unrelated (but very on-brand for people into BeOS I think),
it's so satisfying when a webpage is so free of bloat that navigation
and latency to clicking on things in general feels instant.
s1mn wrote 1 day ago:
I was never cool enough to run BeOS but I coveted it. It looked so cool
and futuristic compared with Windows.
I'm not cool enough to run VitruvianOS either, but i'm glad it exists.
add2 wrote 1 day ago:
How about making Haiku frameworks OS independent?
Findecanor wrote 1 day ago:
There is a blog entry [0] on the web site mentioning that they needed
a Linux kernel module for some missing filesystem pieces, and also
configure the kernel to be realtime.
I wonder what they will do to support BeOS' MediaKit. It has packet
streams with realtime delivery.
[0]
(HTM) [1]: https://v-os.dev/blog/2026/02/10/haiku-runtime-on-linux/
numerio wrote 1 day ago:
We have the same IPC that BeOS/Haiku has so it'd run natively, but
actually Vitruvian will provide a new modern media framework that
is compatible with the old media kit through an external compat
library.
lnxg33k1 wrote 1 day ago:
> Itâs very easy to use. It features an intuitive desktop
> and adopts KISS principles. Anyone can rapidly feel at
>home and use V\OS. User experience, workflow and comfort
> is key.
What is more intuitive than a button to close a window without a X, in
order to make people from every other OSes feel at home [1] -- When
words have no meaning
(HTM) [1]: https://v-os.dev/img/photogrid.png
numerio wrote 1 day ago:
I don't understand the ragebait here. First thing, it's the BeOS GUI
that is like that. Secondarily, seems to me also MacOS X lacks a X
button? Or did they change it? Third, we can discuss about that, it's
trivial to change.
Cheers
yason wrote 1 day ago:
I bought an Amiga in the early 90's and enjoyed it immensely. Commodore
went under and Amiga died.
I bought BeOS in the late 90's and enjoyed it immensely like a breath
of fresh air in a sewage pipe. BeOS died.
With my track record I really, really should've bought Windows. Twice,
to make sure.
WesolyKubeczek wrote 1 day ago:
Looks like you are a âharbinger of failureâ, like me. I have this
fondness for products that ultimately fail.
MarsIronPI wrote 1 day ago:
I'm too young to remember BeOS but I've taken a superficial look at
Haiku and I don't get the hype. What made BeOS so special? How is
it different from GNU/Linux or BSDs?
adastra22 wrote 11 hours 21 min ago:
There is absolutely nothing special about BeOS compared with any of
the modern alternatives that you list, or Windows and macOS for
that matter.
But this was 1995. Linux (or BSD) on the desktop didnât really
exist, Appleâs OS was System 7.5, Microsoftâs was Windows 95.
BeOS was a preemptively multitasking, multimedia operating system,
with a transactional file system. Nothing else like it existed, at
that time.
lproven wrote 1 day ago:
> How is it different from GNU/Linux or BSDs?
I am risking the one full-time paid developer of Haiku popping up
here and shouting at me, because he's done that a few times before
and even written to my editor-in-chief to complain. Sadly for him,
my former EIC was a hardcore techie -- it's how I met him, long
before either of us worked there -- and he was on my side. [1] Unix
is a 1960s design for minicomputers. Minicomputers are text-only
standalone multiuser computers. That is why things like handling
serial lines (/dev/tty -- short for TeleTYpe) are buried deep in
the core of Unix, but networking and graphics aren't.
There is an absolute tonne of legacy baggage like this in Unix. All
Unixes, including Linux kernel 7.0. We do not use minicomputers any
more; nobody even makes them. We don't have multiuser computers
any more. In fact, we have multi computers per user. Modern servers
are just PCs with lots of connections from other computers not from
people.
In the early 1980s the Lisa flopped because it was $10K, but the
Mac did well because it was $2.5K and had a GUI and no shell. The
future, woo, etc.
The Mac was black and white, 1 sound channel, no hard disk, no
expansion slots, and in cutting down the Lisa, Apple discarded
multitasking.
Enter the Hi-Toro Lorraine. Intended to be the ultimate games
console, with a powerful full-16 bit Motorola 68000 chip (a
minicomputer CPU on a sdingle die) amazing colour graphics,
multichannel stereo sound, but it could plug into a TV.
Commodore bought it, renamed it the Amiga, and tried to develop a
fancy new ambitious OS, called Commodore Amiga Operating System:
CAOS.
They couldn't get it to work so it was canned, and a replacement
hastily cobbled together from the research OS Tripos written in
BCPL and some new bits. It had a Mac-like windowing GUI, full
preemptive multitasking (with no memory protection because the
68000 couldn't do that), and it fit on a single DD floppy (~880 kB)
and into 512 kB (1/2 MB) of RAM.
It was a big hit and set a really high bar for expectations of what
an inexpensive home computer could do. It ran rings around the Mac
and could emulate a Mac with excellent compatibility.
A decade later a lot of people missed that. PCs and PC OSes were
very boring by comparison. Sure, reliable, fairly good multitasking
by then, dull grey UIs. Linux was a thing but it was for
minicomputer fetishists only, and looked like it came from 20 years
before Windows or Mac. (Which in a way it did.)
So a former Apple exec set up a company to make a modern geek's
dream machine. Everything had true colour graphics and stereo sound
now, so that was a given, not a selling point. It had to have a
snazzy very fast very smooth GUI, it had to have excellent
multitasking, screaming CPU performance because RISC chips were
starting to take off. Mainstream computers struggled with >1 CPU so
multiple RISC CPUs was the selling point, and amazing blindingly
smooth multimedia support, because PCs and Macs could just about
play one jerky grainy little video in a postage-stamp sized window
in 267 grainy pixelated colours.
The BeBox was to be the mid-1990s geek's dream computer. Part of
how they did it was an all-new multitasking single user OS with a
very smooth built in GUI desktop, best-in-industry media support,
built-in TCP/IP networking. All the cool bits of Windows NT,
multitasking as good as Linux but pretty, a desktop better than
Windows 95, and it threw all the multiuser stuff in the trash, all
the boring server stuff in the trash, because FOSS OSes did that
tedious business stuff.
It was beautiful.
It flopped.
The company pivoted to selling its OS on the other PowerPC kit
vendor: on PowerMacs, with reverse-engineered drivers. It flopped.
Classic MacOS was just barely good enough: crap multitasking, crap
virtual memory, but loads of 1st class leading pro apps. BeOS had
almost none.
So Be pivoted again. It ported its shiny new C++ OS to x86. You
could buy multiprocessor x86 PCs in the late 1990s. I had one.
It was amazing on PC kit. It booted in under a tenth of the time
that Windows sluggishly lurched into life. It could do blinding 3D
like spinning solid shapes while movies played on their surfaces,
and it did it all in software.
I reviewed it. I loved it. [2] But it still had almost no apps and
while Microsoft could not prevent OEMs installing it, it could
prevent them from installing a bootloader: [3] Be sued. [4] It
wasn't enough.
It pivoted into internet appliances but too late.
Me, I felt it should have done a deal with Acorn which was the only
company with affordable multiprocessor ARM workstations at the
time. [5] Haiku is an all-FOSS ground-up rewrite, but with the
original desktop, which was FOSS. It's a lovely mixture of the
Classic MacOS Finder and the Windows 95 Explorer, with the best
bits of both but none of the bad bits.
Haiku is lovely. It's got a huge amount of Linux compatibility now.
That means lots of apps, fixing the one big killer problem of BeOS.
But it is much bigger and much slower. It's still 10x smaller and
10x faster than any FOSS Unix but the original could boot in 5-10
seconds to the desktop in 1999 on a Pentium 200 from a PATA hard
disk. A modern PC with an SSD should load it in half a second, but
Haiku still takes 10 seconds or so. Good, sure, but not as
impressive as BeOS was 25 years ago.
(HTM) [1]: https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/11/haiku_beta_4/
(HTM) [2]: https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorldMagazine/...
(HTM) [3]: https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/
(HTM) [4]: https://www.theregister.com/2002/02/20/be_inc_sues_microso...
(HTM) [5]: https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/55562.html
rjrjrjrj wrote 1 day ago:
Keep in mind that BeOS was released in 1995.
BeOS had pervasive multithreading and a slick UI.
The BeBox had dual CPUs, a novelty at the time and many years
before multi-core CPUs.
Linux was still very new, and didn't have much of a GUI at all
(maybe basic X, but this was long before Gnome, KDE, Englightment,
etc)
Mac System 7 didn't have protected memory or preemptive
multitasking.
Windows 95 was brand new and while a big improvement over Windows
3.1, was still very prone to crashing.
bobsalt wrote 1 day ago:
^this, plus being able to play 3-4 quicktime videos at the same
time smoked everyones brains around me. Using mac os 8/9 was a
several times a day cursor freezing up and having to reboot.
win95 was even worse
vondur wrote 1 day ago:
The one that blew my mind was you can drop a QuickTime movie
onto each side of a 3d cube and they all played without
dropping frames.
rjrjrjrj wrote 1 day ago:
I think I'm remembering this correctly - couldn't you move the
window while the video inside continued to play?
ranger_danger wrote 20 hours 18 min ago:
Yes you could! Windows did have (at some point) "show window
contents while dragging" option, but it was quite slow at the
time, and I don't remember if it supported showing (overlay)
video content while moving or not.
mixmastamyk wrote 1 day ago:
Super responsiveârunning ten things at once, on a Pentium 90 or
PPC. The filesystem metadata was neat as well, and though we have
these things today, it was unique in the 90s.
endemic wrote 1 day ago:
I liked it because it was very fast (I would always demo the
startup time vs. Windows) and had a clean, macOS-inspired UI.
hbbio wrote 1 day ago:
Don't get me started on the Psion 5mx...
Still have it, last time I checked it worked well.
conception wrote 1 day ago:
Correction, BeOS was killed. Iâll never get over Microsoft getting
in trouble for including a browser in Windows but not for forcing
companies to not allow BeOS to be installed when it was getting legs.
chem83 wrote 1 day ago:
I learned recently that Hitachi actually shipped computers that
would dual-boot into Windows 98 and BeOS R4, except that
Microsoft's license didn't allow for dual-boot, so the option was
removed from the bootloader (or, rather, the Microsoft bootloader
was defaulted to, instead of the Be bootloader).
It wasn't that hard to boot into Be, but I suppose most users
wouldn't bother because all games and applications were on Windows
anyway. Ultimately, lack of apps was probably what held it back,
although Microsoft's commercial practices definitely played a role
in curbing OEMs and app developers.
* [1] *
(HTM) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_Flora_Prius
(HTM) [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44217322
limagnolia wrote 1 day ago:
I studied the MS antitrust case extensively when it was happening,
and I agree that the abuse against BeOS was MS greatest antitrust
offense. However, as a fan of BeOS, I see no evidence at all that
Be Inc. would have been successful if MS hadn't abused its
position. Unfortunately we will never really know what might have
been.
tialaramex wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, Be Inc. made no sense at all for its own purposes. The
reason it existed is that Apple (yes, that one) had fired one of
its executives - Jean-Louis Gassée often abbreviated to "JLG" -
and he wanted to show they were wrong.
AIUI the intended exit was either an acquihire (Apple gets JLG
back and the Be Inc. "journey" ends once people tidy up) or maybe
Apple's software side fully embraces Be Inc. (after all JLG is
sure he's correct about what Apple should do) and absorbs the
entire entity as Be's operating system BeOS becomes the new Apple
OS.
That part isn't crazy, it's the early 1990s, affordable CPUs have
virtual memory support, the physical size limit is looming,
software reliability is worsening, Apple's 1980s co-operative
multi-tasking operating system is not up to the job. If you
understand the big picture it's obvious that you want something
closer in principle to a Unix. You could hire somebody to build
one (as Microsoft had for "Windows NT") or some people might
build one in their bedrooms (Linux) or you could buy one which
already exists, so, that's what Be Inc. set out to be.
In the end Apple decided that if they're going to re-hire an
executive who they have fired previously it should be Steve Jobs.
The moment they've made that decision, Be Inc. was superfluous --
JLG knows Steve isn't going to hire him, Steve hates him, so next
the priority now is to help the money get out so that investors
will continue talking to JLG. Fortunately the Dot Com bubble
happened, Be floated on typical bubble era nonsense, about how
their system is somehow perfect for the Internet, and that was
enough for the big money to get out, leaving the wreck for the
poor Be fans who were still buying even after the last dregs were
gone.
fouc wrote 14 hours 51 min ago:
NeXTSTEP was developed from 1989 and then acquired by Apple in
late 1996.
BeOS first release was Oct 1995.
Perhaps BeOS just wasn't far enough along in comparison?
Shame..
dnautics wrote 1 day ago:
jlg posts here occasionally!
im pretty grateful to beos for proving a young me with an
offramp from MS architecture that got me using cli,
understanding api architectures, making it easy to tinker, etc.
tvaughan wrote 1 day ago:
OS/2 Warp was out before Windows 95, and better.
tobinfricke wrote 1 day ago:
I ran OS/2 Warp and was a fan of it... But to say that it was
simply "better" than Windows 95 is a bridge too far. It had its
strengths (rock solid multitasking) but also plenty of rough
edges.
tensor wrote 21 hours 44 min ago:
Honestly any OS with real multi-tasking, real security, and
real memory protection was better than Windows 95 (and 98).
OS/2 was better. BeOS was better. Linux was better. Windows
NT was better.
markus_zhang wrote 13 hours 32 min ago:
It was just the games were on 95.
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
If we ignore the fact that it required 1000 euros more in
additional hardware, thus most folks went with DOS/Windows 3.x
instead, and when Windows 95 came around it was already too
late for adoption.
Shebanator wrote 19 hours 0 min ago:
Exactly: it depends on what you mean by "better". OS/2 had a
much more modern basis, but:
* it was painful to program compared to Windows
* it required a lot more hardware (and thus money) to achieve
the same level of performance.
* the UI was terrible
hamburglar wrote 1 day ago:
To pick a nit, I highly doubt you bought your OS/2 hardware
with euros. :D
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
If I used Escudos it would be useless for the folks reading
my comment.
mikestorrent wrote 21 hours 32 min ago:
Not so, now I know the pre-EU denomination of Portguese
currency
hamburglar wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs ok. The pedantry was unavoidable.
erremerre wrote 1 day ago:
I am in the same boat, every time I like something, it is a
commercial failure. They should really hire me to check if I like
whatever project they got in mind and if I do, cancel immediatetly
and save the losses from being a failure.
henry_bone wrote 19 hours 11 min ago:
100%. Seems there's a whole class of us. If I'd been old enough
at the time to by an early VCR, I'd have chosen betamax.
mgerdts wrote 1 day ago:
You arenât alone:
(HTM) [1]: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/working-defi...
paodealho wrote 1 day ago:
Funny thing. This never happened to me with tech/electronics, but
happens from time to time with food items.
_spduchamp wrote 1 day ago:
This is me. It's like a super power.
wjnc wrote 23 hours 19 min ago:
Buy whatever you want! Buy what makes you happy and buy two if
it makes you happier! Do tell all your friends of your keen
finds. But remember to buy some put options with each of your
Lovely New Products! Thank me later.
MarsIronPI wrote 1 day ago:
(HTM) [1]: https://xkcd.com/2270
jnovek wrote 1 day ago:
They should have me do that with television programs.
jvictor118 wrote 1 day ago:
This post is really bringing me back! I knew talk of BeOS would stir
up all us old heads. I think what we're all really nostalgic for is
the days of tinkering with computers. When things lacked polish, and
people put real effort into making their system nice. I remember
corrupting my family computer hard drive trying to get a Linux
dual-boot setup. Good times!
mech422 wrote 23 hours 6 min ago:
Have you seen Genode (1) ? An operating system framework with a
pretty usable OS built on top. Last I heard, it was getting pretty
close to being usable as a daily driver. lots of cool tech (micro
kernel(IIRC), capabilities, sandboxing as a first class citizen,
GUI system, posix compatibility layer, etc). Its been around for
ages, has full time developers (its used as the basis for some
(all?) of their products.
From the website: "Genode is based on a recursive system structure.
Each program runs in a dedicated sandbox and gets granted only
those access rights and resources that are needed for its specific
purpose. Programs can create and manage sub-sandboxes out of their
own resources, thereby forming hierarchies where policies can be
applied at each level. The framework provides mechanisms to let
programs communicate with each other and trade their resources, but
only in strictly-defined manners. Thanks to this rigid regime, the
attack surface of security-critical functions can be reduced by
orders of magnitude compared to contemporary operating systems."
1
(HTM) [1]: https://genode.org/
JamesonNetworks wrote 1 day ago:
The true rite of passage for the child hacker I remember my dad
and brother taking a floppy to copy a sys file to restore a win 3.1
install from the Samâs display computer in the pre-internet days
chocochunks wrote 1 day ago:
I think I did this with phones. WebOS, BB10, Windows Phone 7 & 8. All
dead lol.
cgk1951 wrote 16 hours 53 min ago:
I was seriously interested in PenPoint, but it was too early for
tablet PCs to succeed. Handwriting recognition was nowhere near
mature enough yet and unfortunately that became the main issue in
that niche. Even Apple pretty much failed with the Newton because
of it.
But PenPoint had a lovely UI and, if memory serves, an API much
like Apple's Objective C.
Microsoft had a hand in killing PenPoint, just as they did with
BeOs. Jerry Kaplan told the story in his book "Startup".
BirAdam wrote 1 day ago:
I was Palm guy and not Blackberry, so I went from a Palm Treo to
webOS. After that though, I went to iPhone. I considered Windows
Phone though. The tiles and text orientation were so amazing. I am,
however, glad that I never went down that road, not just because
Windows Phone died, but also seeing what has happened to Windows
more recently.
codepoet80 wrote 1 day ago:
webOS is still around -- sorta!
(HTM) [1]: https://www.webosarchive.org
thesuitonym wrote 1 day ago:
I use webOS every day (LG television)
ipaddr wrote 1 day ago:
Recently?
BirAdam wrote 1 day ago:
Windows was first released in 1985. Windows 10 and 11 are
therefore "recent".
peterashford wrote 1 day ago:
I think we were on the same track. I absolutely loved the Amiga and
was about to jump on board BeOS when it went under. I never got to
use BeOS as a daily driver (just ran their demo disk). How did you
find it?
danans wrote 1 day ago:
I ran BeOS on both the dual PowerPC desktop and later on an x86
laptop. Thanks to its posix-ish environment, I was able to do all
my upper division CS projects on it.
Others who had windows or macs had to "telnet" into a remote Unix
workstation in an engineering lab to do the same.
yason wrote 1 day ago:
From them internets after the x86 version got out, I think. Played
enough with what I found around, and I ultimately bought (with real
money) the BeOS 5.0 Personal Edition, made it dual-boot my Linux
machine and knew that this is it! It felt like an Amiga but on
soulless PC hardware instead! The exhilaration was unlimited! It
booted fast, no old cruft, unorthodox designs, everything
one-in-a-thousand a true harbinger customer loves!
Eventually I think the setup gradually bit rot with no updates and
unsupported hardware, so I reluctantly had to go back to Linux. I
remember Ubuntu and Gnome 2 started to look pretty nice (well, for
an inferior desktop environment) in the early years of 2000.
(Unsurprisingly, years later Gnome came out with Gnome 3 and killed
all the good stuff that Gnome 2 had accumulated. I can only wait
and see how long Mate desktop survives.)
I still keep a Haiku VM around and boot it every now and then.
prmoustache wrote 1 day ago:
I ran it in a dual boot with linux install but I ended up using
Linux more despite liking beos because of the ecosystem. There were
just more software available on Linux, especially lightweight tui
tools.
makach wrote 1 day ago:
I had to read this message twice, gotcha
shevy-java wrote 1 day ago:
It's been a pain to try to get ruby to work on Haiku,
so I expect that this will be like linux - but worse,
in that barely anything works. I like the design choices
made by BeOS, but we have 2026 now. Linux kind of showed
that practical considerations beat theoretical superiority
(except for the desktop segment, where Linux keeps on
failing hard; see GTK5 not supporting xorg, it is now the
all corporate-dictated wayland era).
numerio wrote 1 day ago:
the cli stuff in Vitruvian are exactly the same you'd get on a debian
install. So it'd just work out of the box on our OS.
rcarmo wrote 1 day ago:
I hope itâs not just the look. The ability to group tabs from various
apps into a single window was the best UX feature it had, and I still
miss it sometimes.
numerio wrote 1 day ago:
it's the real app_server running :) so you have everything you'd
expect
clayhacks wrote 1 day ago:
Ok maybe Iâm too young, but what is BeOS? Everyone here is linking
other alternatives, but no oneâs linked to the original BeOS. Or is
it gone now?
lproven wrote 2 hours 42 min ago:
> Ok maybe Iâm too young, but what is BeOS?
Does this help?
(HTM) [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520510
lobf wrote 1 day ago:
I don't understand this type of helplessness when you're already
competent enough to use HN...
(HTM) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
ranger_danger wrote 20 hours 4 min ago:
"Why did you ask this when you can google it?"
Because sometimes I learn unexpected things and get another
perspective even when I could search for it myself.
gjvc wrote 1 day ago:
stick around...
jonhohle wrote 1 day ago:
Is this a new window manager and tracker or something skinned for this
use case? Wayland, X11? Thereâs a screenshots section but the details
are sparse.
Findecanor wrote 1 day ago:
It is a native windowing system, probably a port from Haiku.
There exists at least one rootless X11 server for BeOS/Haiku that
would run on top, that shouldn't be too difficult to port (knock on
wood ...)
riffraff wrote 1 day ago:
It runs haiku apps through a compatibility layer
numerio wrote 1 day ago:
it's a little bit more of a compatible layer, it's just a native
implementation really. You wouldn't call android a "compatibility
layer" right? Kind of a similar idea here.
jazzyjackson wrote 1 day ago:
Iâll try this out with my eink display, interface might look good in
grayscale. So far my favorite desktop for this is the Chicago95 theme
for xfce
dddw wrote 1 day ago:
Do share a screenshot if you do. What refreshrate do you have on that
display?
blacklion wrote 1 day ago:
I think, in case of e-Ink photo is much more informative, as
screenshot takes data from frame buffer and didn't take screen
technology in account.
jazzyjackson wrote 13 hours 0 min ago:
:P lol indeed a screeshot would be full color
Perhaps I can place the monitor on my scanner and take a
âscreenshotâ that way xD
Re: refresh rates I canât find a good stat with a brief
googling but itâs a Boox Mira, E Ink VB3300-NCD
You can tolerably watch video so somewhere north of 20fps but
thereâs ghosting. A friendly button on the front of the display
is there to do a hard refresh if the artifacts build up too much.
But yes I should do a comparison on how different desktop
environments do, with animations turned off etc, scrolling that
jumps line by line like vim or eMacs will work better than smooth
scrolling for instance.
blacklion wrote 3 hours 10 min ago:
I've tried smartphone with e-Ink (mostly for motorcycle and
hiking navigation, not as daily driver) and know this problem
â it is impossible to share this experience via screenshots
or screen recordings :)
WD-42 wrote 1 day ago:
UI elements that have depth look so mouth-wateringly good now. So over
the minimalism and bouncing back hard.
716dpl wrote 1 day ago:
I find it soothing. There is ornamentation in its design, but it's
precise and minimal, but also friendly. The icons, in particular,
look so good.
InsideOutSanta wrote 1 day ago:
Late 90s visual design for operating systems - in particular Mac OS 8
and BeOS - is peak OS design. Aesthetically pleasing and a very
clear, highly readable visual language based on well-researched human
interface guidelines.
It was uphill all the way before that point, and downhill ever since.
pndy wrote 1 day ago:
It fitted right these times when everything had that pseudo-3D gray
outlook but yet was unique with these small yellow title bars (which
you could move), diagonal icons and taskbar that could be placed in
both corners and edges of the screen. Now compare that last thing to
what MS did to Windows 11 taskbar, and only in last days announced
it'll gladly restore previous behavior.
Haiku retained all of this and bring something new like combining
various windows into single tabbed one - not sure if any other system
has such feature. Or... toolbar in file manager - which is something
I really missed back then in BeOS.
Back then BeOS was much more stable and faster than my daily Win98SE,
even working in that image file on FAT32 partition.
Kinda makes you wonder, how things would go if Apple would pick BeOS
as their OS instead of Jobs' NeXT. Would it still looks same or it
would go thru all stages we've seen - with glass, transparency and
then flatness and darkpatterns producing minimalism.
diskzero wrote 1 day ago:
As a former Be employee who ended up at Apple by way of Eazel,
there are two ways to answering your question about the UI
direction; 1. If Apple did not acquire Be, Apple most likely would
not be in business or would be a much different company. 2.
Assuming Apple did survive, Steve Jobs used the industrial design
language of Jony Ive for the look of Aqua. Bas Ording was the
primary designer of this and was directed by Steve with daily
updates. The further evolutions of brushed metal, skeumorphism,
etc. were all directly driven by how Steve wanted things to look
with minimal input from others. The current bland minimalist UX
disaster (IMHO) would probably not have happened, because for all
of his faults, Steve had very good attention to detail and was in
general a good proxy for the user.
kannanvijayan wrote 1 day ago:
I remember being very disappointed when Apple went with the NeXT
tech instead of the Be tech. I was in undergrad when that
happened.
In retrospect though, the company wasn't making a technology
decision. They were making a decision between Jobs and Gassee.
Jobs came with NeXT and Gassee came with Be.
I don't think the technology mattered that much in the large scale
of things. Jobs brought with him a strategy for moving personal
computing from a technical market category to a fashion market
category - either to make technology fashionable or to make fashion
technical (however you want to look at it). It's a strategy that
started with candy-coloured iMacs and ended with iPhones.
Gassee brought a really cool OS.
Apple made the right choice.
diskzero wrote 1 day ago:
In retrospect though, the company wasn't making a technology
decision. They were making a decision between Jobs and Gassee.
Jobs came with NeXT and Gassee came with Be.
I don't think the technology mattered that much in the large
scale of things.
Yes and no. The core of the purchase decision was really based on
the technology. Ellen Hancock (Apple's CTO at the time) actually
did a decent analysis of BeOs and NeXTStep. She was actually
against some aspects of the purchase, and was not in favor of Be.
She was also not in favor of the NeXT kernel. It is painful to
say as a Be employee at the time, but Be internals were fragile,
some technologies were very shallow, the kernel was brittle and
under constant churn and we had big problems with our decision to
have a C++ API. Gil Amelio liked Steve and Steve did a good job
selling both a vision and the NeXT technology. BeOs was a really
cool demo that was getting pulled into the direction of a real OS
but had a long, long way to go. There actually was a possibility
that Apple could have also gotten the Be code, but the board
didn't go for it. As it turned out, most of the primary BeOs
developers ended up at Apple via Eazel. The ones that didn't
ended up at Google via Danger Research/Android.
kannanvijayan wrote 13 hours 57 min ago:
Always interesting to get an insiders take! I really
appreciate the insight.
gond wrote 23 hours 21 min ago:
Thank you for the Be-related posts. Maybe, one day, you could
write a more detailed report of it in a format made for longer
articles. I would read it.
chuckadams wrote 1 day ago:
I believe the saying goes that NeXT acquired Apple for -$427
million.
unixhero wrote 1 day ago:
Why should users not instead go for Haiku
jonhohle wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs Linux, with all of the support that provides. Not a knock on
Haiku, but if I can have a BeOS window manager and Tracker, while
running modern Linux binaries natively, Iâd be a happy.
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
You mean Electron apps.
Gabrys1 wrote 1 day ago:
For my daily machine, I need Docker, terminal, Firefox (for private
browsing), Chrome (for work), VS Code and/or JetBains IDE. If this
can feel a bit like I remember BeOs felt, that'd be awesome
KnuthIsGod wrote 1 day ago:
Why does the marketing read like slop ?
"VitruvianOS is an alternative Linux desktop with a singular
philosophy: the human at the center."
(HTM) [1]: https://v-os.dev/news/vitruvian-0.3.0-available/
28304283409234 wrote 1 day ago:
Because they're enthusiastic engineers. Not marketing people.
donatj wrote 1 day ago:
The important question becomes can you stack the window decoration
"tabs" of different apps into a single stack of tabs like in BeOS?
Demonstrated here (animated):
(HTM) [1]: https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/images/gui-images/g...
samtheDamned wrote 1 day ago:
I tried to install a quick VM to answer this exact question but I had
some difficult getting it running in Gnome Boxes.
numerio wrote 1 day ago:
Yes the UX is virtually the same
guerrilla wrote 1 day ago:
This is what we needed in our OSes instead of Firefox tabs.
Schlagbohrer wrote 1 day ago:
How is it that different?
yesbut wrote 1 day ago:
basically every app is a tab. this is how I run i3wm. full screen
tabbed layout. smaller modal windows still appear in their normal
smaller windows in front of the current full screen app.
msk-lywenn wrote 1 day ago:
I used to run fluxbox in the early 2000s. I greatly miss tabbing any
windows like that.
malicka wrote 1 day ago:
You can run fluxbox today! I still do, I canât go without window
tabs. :^)
gedy wrote 1 day ago:
I believe the Cosmic Desktop from Pop OS has that again
Zardoz84 wrote 1 day ago:
KDE had it. And I missed it a lot.
nunodonato wrote 1 day ago:
me too! fluxbox and gkrellm for some kick ass desktop "widgets"
monitoring the computer :D
guerrilla wrote 1 day ago:
There's no equivalent on Wayland?
BirAdam wrote 1 day ago:
Sway.
nico wrote 1 day ago:
BeOS was such an amazing experience back in the day. It really felt
magical. Too bad it got shutdown. I wonder what the evolution of it
would be like today
ErroneousBosh wrote 1 day ago:
You can pretty much just use Haiku as a daily driver these days, if
your demands aren't too great. It runs really well on older hardware
too.
And of course you can just spin it up in a VM if you only want to
play a bit.
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
For me it felt like it was going to be my next Amiga, in kind of
experience, something that GNU/Linux never did it to me, where CLI
reigns and multimedia was always looked down upon, Windows and Mac OS
weren't quite there as well.
Another cool one that was around was QNX.
innocentoldguy wrote 1 day ago:
I just found my BeOS 5 and BeProductive CDs from the late 90s. I wish
I had something to run them on.
mlhpdx wrote 1 day ago:
What would they run on these days? I mean other than my old Gateway
2000 dual Pentium Pro with 32MB of RAM and dual booting BeOS and
NT4?
setopt wrote 1 day ago:
If I recall directly, Apple was between buying BeOS and NeXT. Would
be interesting what would have happened if they went the Be route
instead of the Unix route. (But given that MacOS and BeOS were both
fringe at the time, perhaps they would just have gone bankruptâ¦)
panick21_ wrote 1 day ago:
I think at the time everybody agree that BeOS would need a whole
lot more work put into it compared to NeXT. That said it still took
a huge amount of work to evolve NeXT to OSX.
So I can well imagine Apple fucking this up and getting aquired.
ab5tract wrote 1 day ago:
Considering that Steve Jobs came with NeXT, the general consensus
has been that their recovery would not have been nearly as
significant.
The real what-if for me is pondering what might have been had HP
and other vendors not caved to the Wintel cartel in abandoning
their plans to include BeOS as a preinstalled OEM option. Microsoft
was sued by Be in civil court and Be won their case, but it was too
little too late.
BirAdam wrote 1 day ago:
Jobs worked on NeXT and Jean-Louis Gassée was working on Be.
Gassée had brought the world the Macintosh Portable and the
IIfx, and he started the Newton project which had the effect of
keep ARM alive.
When Gassée left Apple, he took many of Apple's best with him.
If we want to know what Apple would have looked like under
Gassée, I think it's easier to look at how many products he
killed. Much of Apple's leadership was trying to force budget
computers like the PC industry was building. Gassée would have
none of it. He was focused on exceptionally good hardware married
to exceptionally good software, knew the handheld devices would
be vital in the future, but he didn't like boring things. I
imagine that Apple built around Be would have delivered many of
the same things, but wouldn't have become just plain brushed
aluminum everywhere.
The curious part would have been the OS. BeOS and NeXT are wildly
different.
silisili wrote 1 day ago:
My first memory of BeOS was that it could play media independently.
You could play a video in one window, and an MP3 or another video in
another, and they'd both play audio at the same time.
I don't know exactly why, but child me thought that was so
interesting, since every other OS at the time seemed unable to.
bluedino wrote 1 day ago:
BeOS was released in October 1995, and Windows 95 was able to play
two videos (or more) at one time, with audio from both.
eightman wrote 1 day ago:
(HTM) [1]: https://www.haiku-os.org/
AlecSchueler wrote 1 day ago:
I love Haiku but I feel it's quite different than where BeOS would
be today had BeOS continued to exist. In that alternative world
there might have been considerably more influence from BeOS going
into the rest of the industry much sooner, and that effect could
have snowballed.
ofrzeta wrote 1 day ago:
"Real-time patched Linux kernel for low-latency desktop use" - does
this really make sense? I think there have been various efforts like
this over the decades but as far as I remember none of them really made
a huge difference for the end user.
worthless-trash wrote 1 day ago:
IIRC the realtime patchset that RHEL maintained in its own
branch/tree was upstreamed last year.
I don't think it makes sense for desktop applications, it may make
sense if sound latency is a priority but even then stock kernel
delivered lower latency in many cases.
numerio wrote 1 day ago:
I won't say you're wrong because you aren't, in fact the system
works very well also with non-rt kernels. But the graphical stack
is not really designed like the average linux stack, the BeOS is
somewhat hungry in terms of timing and I believe our implementation
can take advantage of a RT kernel. But if it'd proven unnecessary
I'd be 100% for changing it back, it's just a package in our image
creation code after all, we don't strictly depend on it.
worthless-trash wrote 11 hours 14 min ago:
Can i take a moment to thank you for working this project. I
wont pretend to understand the mammoth undertaking to get this to
the state that its in. Good work.
rebolek wrote 1 day ago:
If you like BeOS, take a look at Haiku [1] , it's very nice and very
usable system based directly on BeOS.
(HTM) [1]: https://www.haiku-os.org/
hym_the_pawn wrote 1 day ago:
Vitruvian can potentially have everything Haiku has (it's the same
identical stack BTW) but with the power of linux.
It's cool if people could start to appreciate both visions.
leke wrote 1 day ago:
I'm so confused right now.
10729287 wrote 1 day ago:
I've been a fan of Beos philosophy since the Personal Edition but
never had the occasion to run it on steel as I was too poor to have
two machines back in the days, and now I miss login/password prompt
at boot on Haiku. But i'm following it closely and I hope i'll be
able to install it on my X220 for a web/mail machine !
hnlmorg wrote 1 day ago:
You didnât need two machines to run BeOS. I ran very smoothly on
a Windows PC via dual booting.
BeOS 5 could even be installed on a Windows FAT32 partition
alongside Windows (it created a 50MB virtual disk).
At one point in time I had Windows 95, Windows 2000, Linux
(possibly Slackware) and BeOS 5 all running on the same single PC.
10729287 wrote 1 day ago:
I was probably younger than you, and on the family computer.
Couldn't make what I want and mess with booting back then ! I
remember trying the PE edition through windows but couldn't
install it.
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
And much better option, running the real deal, instead of some
compatibility layer.
hrmtst93837 wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe, but at some point you're duct-taping 90s driver hacks just
to run Haiku on modern hardware unless you enjoy daily spelunking
in kernel panics.
akho wrote 1 day ago:
I suspect Linux has better hardware support than Haiku, which is
not exactly easy to run on laptop hardware (w/ wifi, sleep, &c)
O1111OOO wrote 20 hours 5 min ago:
> I suspect Linux has better hardware support than Haiku, which
is not exactly easy to run on laptop hardware (w/ wifi, sleep,
&c)
So true. I had an old Dell Latitude D620, 3GB/500GB, 1.66ghz
Intel Core Duo Processor and it was sound that tripped me up.
Haiku was lightning fast on this machine.
I think that eventually I might've gotten sound to work but...
this was many years ago and the laptop was mostly for testing
light-weight distros on modest hardware.
SuperNinKenDo wrote 1 day ago:
I suspect it was a freak occurence, but I actually had incredible
luck running Haiku on an old laptop back in the day. It was
incredibly fast, and just about all the amenities you'd expect
worked with no or minimal intervention.
nomdep wrote 17 hours 47 min ago:
Me too. The laptop was so old that I couldn't play a 360p mpg
video without pauses on Windows 2K or XFCE, but it ran smoothly
with BeOS5 (the Intel-based abandonware version)
pabs3 wrote 1 day ago:
In the last year sometime I ran the Haiku live image off USB on
my only laptop (2011 X201t), it worked fairly well.
cachius wrote 1 day ago:
Even running from an HDD?
SuperNinKenDo wrote 21 hours 31 min ago:
Yeah. I installed it to HDD and it worked great. You'd think
the thing had an SSD ot was so snappy. No issues with compat
on the drive or anything.
trinix912 wrote 1 day ago:
I recently tried the latest version (Beta 5?) on a 2005-ish
PC with an even older HDD and it ran surprisingly fast off
that. The only thing where it was somewhat slow was web
browsing.
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, a good opportunity to contribute upstream.
shevy-java wrote 1 day ago:
And things such as ruby don't work on it. Well, what shall
I say? The "best" ideas get beaten when in practically already
works very well - aka Linux. People need to compare to Linux
and if there are failure points, they need to fix it. Haiku
keeps on failing at core considerations. If you look at guides,
they recommend to "run in qemu". Well, that is a fever dream.
They need to focus on real hardware. And they need to support
programming languages just as Linux does. And modern hardware
too. Would be great if Haiku could shape up but the development
is way too slow. I've been looking at it for many years - they
are simply unable to leave the dream era. ReactOS is even worse
in this regard. At some point those projects gave up on the real
world. I think qemu, while great, kind of made this problem
worse, since people no longer focus on real hardware; the mantra
is "if it works in a virtual EM, it is perfect". Until one notices
that it doesn't work quite as well on real hardware. Case in point
how ruby does not work on Haiku. Ruby works well on BSD (for the
most
part), linux (no surprise) and also windows (a bit annoying, but it
does work there too and surprisingly well, for about 99% of the use
cases, though it is annoyingly slower in startup time compared to
linux).
orr721 wrote 20 hours 17 min ago:
What does not work? You can install Ruby version 3.2.9
(2025-07-24) with a point-and-click package manager HaikuDepot
and it works perfectly fine.
waddlesplash wrote 1 day ago:
> And things such as ruby don't work on it.
What doesn't work about it? We have Ruby in the software
repositories, and Ruby is required to build WebKit (and we build
WebKit on Haiku), so clearly it works for that much at least. I
don't see any open tickets at HaikuPorts about bugs in the port,
either.
chuckadams wrote 1 day ago:
Huh, PHP works on Haiku, and there aren't even that many #ifdefs
for it in the source. If a language can be ported to Windows,
Haiku should be a no-brainer. Seems more a matter of having
someone interested in maintaining the port, and I think it
ultimately just points to the size of Haiku's userbase being a
rounding error.
59nadir wrote 1 day ago:
> I've been looking at it for many years - they are simply unable
to leave the dream era.
Sit down and do the work needed to get Ruby running properly on
Haiku instead of sitting here complaining and basically admitting
that you're just being a noisy spectator... On HackerNews, no
less.
rebolek wrote 1 day ago:
Getting Rebol running on Haiku was fairly easy task, so I guess
it shouldn't be that hard for Ruby too, if someone's willing to
do the work.
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
People aren't really running servers on Haiku, which is basically
the only relevance to use Ruby in 2026, Rails powered web
applications.
Then again, there is a golden opportunity to become a Ruby
contributor, road to fame on Ruby contribution list.
vidarh wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe 5% of what I use Ruby for is on the server. I'd suggest
those of us who use Ruby client side are likely to outnumber
Haiku users by magnitude or two.
cpuguy83 wrote 1 day ago:
Homebrew would like a word.
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
Mostly relevant for folks on macOS, and I skip on it when
using Mac anyway rather using UNIX and SDK tools in the box,
so kind of debatable.
cpuguy83 wrote 1 day ago:
Debatable because you don't use it?
timw4mail wrote 1 day ago:
Homebrew wouldn't support Haiku anyway.
AlecSchueler wrote 1 day ago:
Presumably there's a lot more modern software written for Linux
which you'd end up running through a compatibility layer from
Haiku? The better option seems relative. I could be misremembering
how Linux programmes are handled on Haiku though.
smallstepforman wrote 12 hours 50 min ago:
In Haiku windowing system, each app window gets its own thread so
dialog boxes run in a different thread to the main window and a
different thread to the core app. In Linux, all windows share the
same message loop thread. A simple port reveals threading issues
in Haiku which dont exist on Linux.
To work around this, all window messages in ported apps are
marshalled to execute sequentially. Small additional overhead,
and the system doesnt spread available threads, so noticably
slower.
Compare a native Haiku app with a ported app, one is smooth as
ice while the other isnt. Users notice it. This is on many core
systems.
jcgl wrote 10 hours 38 min ago:
> In Linux, all windows share the same message loop thread.
I'm no expert, but aren't you just talking about Xorg here? As
far as my limited knowledge goes, there's nothing inherent in
the Wayland protocol that would imply this.
chrsw wrote 1 day ago:
VitruvianOS has the clothes of BeOS, which is nice and
refreshing.
But Haiku has the soul.
c-c-c-c-c wrote 1 day ago:
But Vitruvian is running its own graphics stack so no X11 or
wayland applications will run afaict.
hym_the_pawn wrote 1 day ago:
Not quite really.
Vitruvian runs virtually the same identical sw stack of Haiku
and there's a haiku-wayland that works.
However on vitruvian the app_server could provide real Gbm
buffers, so that would give us pretty much native rendering.
We're still working on it but you'd have the advantages of a
BeOS-like gui and the power of linux!
reverius42 wrote 1 day ago:
So what's the point of this -- it's essentially a different
Haiku?
galangalalgol wrote 1 day ago:
I think itbis the reverse, it is haiku with a linux kernel so
it works with more hardware.
anthk wrote 1 day ago:
With xlibe they should.
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe the fallacy is not exploring what a given OS is great at?
We don't need to clone UNIX all over the place.
hnlmorg wrote 1 day ago:
How strictly do you mean âUNIX cloneâ? Because Linux
isnât strictly UNIX. But then at the other end of the scale,
BeOS was also partially POSIX compliant and shipped with Bash
plenty of UNIX CLI tools.
Perhaps itâs better to play it safe and just run DOS instead
;)
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
It certainly is, what it is not, is a derivative.
BeOS on its final commercial version certainly did not allow
to compile UNIX applications, beyond the common surface that
is part of ISO C and ISO C++ standard library.
aaronbrethorst wrote 1 day ago:
Vitruvian asks a different question: what would I actually want to do
with my computer that I currently canât?
Only be able to drag a window around the screen from the top left
corner
danwills wrote 1 day ago:
On many Linux desktop environments it is the default - or can be
configured: To hold the Windows Key ('meta') and left-mouse-drag a
window around from _anywhere inside the window_! No need to get the
mouse into the 'title bar'!
Additionally, meta+middle-mouse-drag allows one to resize a window
from anywhere in the whole window!! (it chooses the closest corner
when the drag starts) and this, being able to resize a window without
needing to put the mouse in a usually-very-thin window border, is
extremely liberating in my opinion! To the point where I really miss
it on sub-windows where the app is handling resizing/etc itself!
There's a Windows app I used to use that supports the same kind of
thing for Windows (different key I think), no idea if there's one for
Mac I'm afraid - or whether it can be configured to work that way,
but there probably is one so it would be worth investigating if this
sounds useful to you I'd say!
lproven wrote 2 hours 47 min ago:
> There's a Windows app I used to use that supports the same kind
of thing for Windows
Taekwindow: [1] I rarely use Windows but any box I do need to use
for a while, I put Taekwindow on it. I only want the Linux feature
of middle-clicking the titlebar to send to the back, myself, I
don't want or need moving or resizing, but they're there.
(HTM) [1]: https://ttencate.github.io/taekwindow/
bandie91 wrote 1 day ago:
yes, Alt+drag (it's always meta, not meta4, by default on systems i
use) has been and still is a killer feature to me. on desktops
which does not support it, like windows, i feel like my hands were
tied.
ianlevesque wrote 1 day ago:
To be fair that's one more corner than Tahoe.
aaronbrethorst wrote 1 day ago:
Touché, and such a good reminder why everyone should wait for
macOS 27.
thisislife2 wrote 1 day ago:
This is interesting - a Linux distro that really differentiates itself
technically, instead of just having a different GUI / desktop
environment.
Yaggo wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, first I thought this is just a BeOS-inspired GUI theme, but
there is more to it:
Nexus is Vitruvian's custom Linux kernel subsystem that brings
BeOS-style
node monitoring, device tracking, and messaging to Linux â
making it
possible to run Haiku applications on a standard Linux kernel.
asadm wrote 1 day ago:
is there a debian distro that is close to win98. Sorta like ReactOS but
can be daily-driven.
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
Try this:
(HTM) [1]: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
xfce4 wrote 1 day ago:
install it on devuan and you'll be fine
leke wrote 1 day ago:
So this is a lighter weight alternative to other Linux desktops?
tadfisher wrote 1 day ago:
Well, it can't run X or Wayland apps, so I wouldn't call it an
alternative to those. An alternative to Haiku maybe.
ranger_danger wrote 20 hours 6 min ago:
(HTM) [1]: https://github.com/X547/wayland-server
Gabrys1 wrote 1 day ago:
why no X11?
ErroneousBosh wrote 1 day ago:
Because everyone's going for Wayland, even though you still need
XWayland to do anything useful on it because Wayland is comically
incomplete.
Gabrys1 wrote 1 day ago:
well, I mean, why can't this ship with an X server? Or maybe it
does and then I'm not sure why it is said that only Haiku apps
are supported
numerio wrote 1 day ago:
It's not that it can't, if you can do something it doesn't
mean you should. If we used X it'd be another linux distro
isn't it? Part of the fun is to make your own UI feel.
watersb wrote 1 day ago:
25 years ago, I configured GNOME to run a BeOS-like tabbed window
manager. On a sun workstation.
But that's not what this is. Or not only:
Nexus Kernel Bridge
Nexus is Vitruvian's custom Linux kernel subsystem that brings
BeOS-style node monitoring, device tracking, and messaging to Linux â
making it possible to run Haiku applications on a standard Linux
kernel.
It claims to run apps from Haiku, the current open-source
implementation of a modern BeOS.
zozbot234 wrote 1 day ago:
Looks like this is a thin translation layer for BeOS/Haiku syscalls.
I wonder why they aren't relying on Syscall User Dispatch [1] which
would enable them to put this compatibility layer in user space. It's
already being used by recent Wine versions.
(HTM) [1]: https://docs.kernel.org/6.19/admin-guide/syscall-user-dispat...
numerio wrote 1 day ago:
BTW because that would not solve any problem for us, the technique
you're linking can be useful only if what you want to achieve is
binary compatibility otherwise it's useless. That's not really what
we are after.
hym_the_pawn wrote 1 day ago:
It's not really a translation layer, nexus implements the same
BeOS/Haiku IPC in kernel but using linux kernel primitives.
It's not as much as a translation layer than any other IPC in the
linux system, really BeOS/Haiku apps are first class citizens.
p_l wrote 13 hours 14 min ago:
Most of BeOS IPC is in mainline Linux kernel [1] - the difference
here seems to be implementing some of the services that are
supposed to be available related to filesystem etc and the user
land side of it (raw IPC does very little without another layer
on top)
[1] - there's a reason why a bunch of BeBook reads the same as
some of the oldest parts of Android documentation
arm wrote 1 day ago:
More context here:
(HTM) [1]: https://v-os.dev/news/vitruvian-0.3.0-available/
unixhero wrote 1 day ago:
Ah yes! It is human at the center. Now things are starting to make
sense.
unmole wrote 1 day ago:
I don't see any actual context, just vacuous slop.
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