[HN Gopher] VitruvianOS - Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS
___________________________________________________________________
VitruvianOS - Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS
Author : felixding
Score : 317 points
Date : 2026-03-25 03:17 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (v-os.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (v-os.dev)
| arm wrote:
| More context here:
|
| https://v-os.dev/news/vitruvian-0.3.0-available/
| unmole wrote:
| I don't see any actual _context_ , just vacuous slop.
| unixhero wrote:
| Ah yes! It is human at the center. Now things are starting to
| make sense.
| watersb wrote:
| 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 -- 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:
| Looks like this is a thin translation layer for BeOS/Haiku
| syscalls. I wonder why they aren't relying on Syscall User
| Dispatch https://docs.kernel.org/6.19/admin-guide/syscall-user-
| dispat... which would enable them to put this compatibility
| layer in user space. It's already being used by recent Wine
| versions.
| hym_the_pawn wrote:
| 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.
| leke wrote:
| So this is a lighter weight alternative to other Linux desktops?
| tadfisher wrote:
| Well, it can't run X or Wayland apps, so I wouldn't call it an
| alternative to those. An alternative to Haiku maybe.
| Gabrys1 wrote:
| why no X11?
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| https://github.com/X547/wayland-server
| asadm wrote:
| is there a debian distro that is close to win98. Sorta like
| ReactOS but can be daily-driven.
| kube-system wrote:
| Try this:
|
| https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
| xfce4 wrote:
| install it on devuan and you'll be fine
| thisislife2 wrote:
| This is interesting - a Linux distro that really differentiates
| itself _technically_ , instead of just having a different GUI /
| desktop environment.
| Yaggo wrote:
| 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 --
| making it possible to run Haiku applications on a
| standard Linux kernel.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| _Vitruvian asks a different question: what would I actually want
| to do with my computer that I currently can't?_
|
| Only be able to drag a window around the screen from the top left
| corner
| ianlevesque wrote:
| To be fair that's one more corner than Tahoe.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Touche, and such a good reminder why everyone should wait for
| macOS 27.
| danwills wrote:
| 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!
| bandie91 wrote:
| 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.
| rebolek wrote:
| If you like BeOS, take a look at Haiku https://www.haiku-os.org/
| , it's very nice and very usable system based directly on BeOS.
| pjmlp wrote:
| And much better option, running the real deal, instead of some
| compatibility layer.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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:
| How strictly do you mean "UNIX clone"? Because Linux
| isn't 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 it's better to play it safe and just run DOS
| instead ;)
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| c-c-c-c-c wrote:
| But Vitruvian is running its own graphics stack so no X11
| or wayland applications will run afaict.
| anthk wrote:
| With xlibe they should.
| reverius42 wrote:
| So what's the point of this -- it's essentially a
| different Haiku?
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I think itbis the reverse, it is haiku with a linux
| kernel so it works with more hardware.
| hym_the_pawn wrote:
| 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!
| chrsw wrote:
| VitruvianOS has the clothes of BeOS, which is nice and
| refreshing.
|
| But Haiku has the soul.
| shevy-java wrote:
| 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).
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| cpuguy83 wrote:
| Homebrew would like a word.
| timw4mail wrote:
| Homebrew wouldn't support Haiku anyway.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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:
| Debatable because _you_ don 't use it?
| vidarh wrote:
| 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.
| rebolek wrote:
| 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.
| 59nadir wrote:
| > 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 _Hacker_ News, no less.
| chuckadams wrote:
| 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.
| waddlesplash wrote:
| > 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.
| orr721 wrote:
| 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.
| akho wrote:
| I suspect Linux has better hardware support than Haiku, which
| is not exactly easy to run on laptop hardware (w/ wifi,
| sleep, &c)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah, a good opportunity to contribute upstream.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| 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.
| cachius wrote:
| Even running from an HDD?
| trinix912 wrote:
| 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.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| 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.
| pabs3 wrote:
| In the last year sometime I ran the Haiku live image off
| USB on my only laptop (2011 X201t), it worked fairly
| well.
| O1111OOO wrote:
| > 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 a
| test machine for light-weight distros that I wanted to test
| on modest hardware.
| hrmtst93837 wrote:
| 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.
| 10729287 wrote:
| 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:
| You didn't 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:
| 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.
| hym_the_pawn wrote:
| 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:
| I'm so confused right now.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| "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:
| 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:
| 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.
| nico wrote:
| 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
| eightman wrote:
| https://www.haiku-os.org/
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| 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.
| silisili wrote:
| 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:
| BeOS was released in October 1995, and Windows 95 was able to
| play two videos (or more) at one time, with audio from both.
| setopt wrote:
| 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 bankrupt...)
| ab5tract wrote:
| 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:
| Jobs worked on NeXT and Jean-Louis Gassee was working on
| Be. Gassee 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 Gassee left Apple, he took many of Apple's best with
| him. If we want to know what Apple would have looked like
| under Gassee, 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. Gassee 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.
| panick21_ wrote:
| 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.
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| I just found my BeOS 5 and BeProductive CDs from the late 90s.
| I wish I had something to run them on.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| 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?
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| 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.
| donatj wrote:
| 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):
|
| https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/images/gui-images...
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| I used to run fluxbox in the early 2000s. I greatly miss
| tabbing any windows like that.
| guerrilla wrote:
| There's no equivalent on Wayland?
| BirAdam wrote:
| Sway.
| nunodonato wrote:
| me too! fluxbox and gkrellm for some kick ass desktop
| "widgets" monitoring the computer :D
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| KDE had it. And I missed it a lot.
| gedy wrote:
| I believe the Cosmic Desktop from Pop OS has that again
| malicka wrote:
| You can run fluxbox today! I still do, I can't go without
| window tabs. :^)
| guerrilla wrote:
| This is what we needed in our OSes instead of Firefox tabs.
| Schlagbohrer wrote:
| How is it that different?
| yesbut wrote:
| 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.
| numerio wrote:
| Yes the UX is virtually the same
| samtheDamned wrote:
| I tried to install a quick VM to answer this exact question but
| I had some difficult getting it running in Gnome Boxes.
| KnuthIsGod wrote:
| Why does the marketing read like slop ?
|
| "VitruvianOS is an alternative Linux desktop with a singular
| philosophy: the human at the center."
|
| https://v-os.dev/news/vitruvian-0.3.0-available/
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| Because they're enthusiastic engineers. Not marketing people.
| unixhero wrote:
| Why should users not instead go for Haiku
| jonhohle wrote:
| It's 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, I'd be a happy.
| Gabrys1 wrote:
| 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
| pjmlp wrote:
| You mean Electron apps.
| WD-42 wrote:
| UI elements that have depth look so mouth-wateringly good now. So
| over the minimalism and bouncing back hard.
| pndy wrote:
| 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.
| kannanvijayan wrote:
| 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.
| chuckadams wrote:
| I believe the saying goes that NeXT acquired Apple for
| -$427 million.
| diskzero wrote:
| _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.
| gond wrote:
| 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.
| diskzero wrote:
| 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.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| 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.
| 716dpl wrote:
| 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.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I'll 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:
| Do share a screenshot if you do. What refreshrate do you have
| on that display?
| blacklion wrote:
| 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.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Is this a new window manager and tracker or something skinned for
| this use case? Wayland, X11? There's a screenshots section but
| the details are sparse.
| riffraff wrote:
| It runs haiku apps through a compatibility layer
| numerio wrote:
| 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.
| Findecanor wrote:
| 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 ...)
| clayhacks wrote:
| Ok maybe I'm too young, but what is BeOS? Everyone here is
| linking other alternatives, but no one's linked to the original
| BeOS. Or is it gone now?
| lobf wrote:
| I don't understand this type of helplessness when you're
| already competent enough to use HN...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
| gjvc wrote:
| stick around...
| ranger_danger wrote:
| "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.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I hope it's 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:
| it's the real app_server running :) so you have everything
| you'd expect
| shevy-java wrote:
| 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).
| yason wrote:
| 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.
| makach wrote:
| I had to read this message twice, gotcha
| peterashford wrote:
| 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?
| prmoustache wrote:
| 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.
| yason wrote:
| 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.
| danans wrote:
| 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.
| chocochunks wrote:
| I think I did this with phones. WebOS, BB10, Windows Phone 7 &
| 8. All dead lol.
| BirAdam wrote:
| 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.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Recently?
| BirAdam wrote:
| Windows was first released in 1985. Windows 10 and 11 are
| therefore "recent".
| codepoet80 wrote:
| webOS is still around -- sorta!
| https://www.webosarchive.org
| thesuitonym wrote:
| I use webOS every day (LG television)
| jvictor118 wrote:
| 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!
| JamesonNetworks wrote:
| 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 Sam's display computer in the pre-
| internet days
| mech422 wrote:
| 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 https://genode.org/
| erremerre wrote:
| 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.
| jnovek wrote:
| They should have me do that with television programs.
| mgerdts wrote:
| You aren't alone:
|
| https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/working-
| defini...
| _spduchamp wrote:
| This is me. It's like a super power.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/2270
| wjnc wrote:
| 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.
| paodealho wrote:
| Funny thing. This never happened to me with
| tech/electronics, but happens from time to time with food
| items.
| henry_bone wrote:
| 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.
| conception wrote:
| Correction, BeOS was killed. I'll 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.
| limagnolia wrote:
| 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.
| tvaughan wrote:
| OS/2 Warp was out before Windows 95, and better.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| hamburglar wrote:
| To pick a nit, I highly doubt you bought your OS/2
| hardware with euros. :D
| pjmlp wrote:
| If I used Escudos it would be useless for the folks
| reading my comment.
| hamburglar wrote:
| It's ok. The pedantry was unavoidable.
| mikestorrent wrote:
| Not so, now I know the pre-EU denomination of Portguese
| currency
| tobinfricke wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| tialaramex wrote:
| 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 Gassee 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.
| dnautics wrote:
| 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.
| chem83 wrote:
| 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.
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_Flora_Prius *
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44217322
| hbbio wrote:
| Don't get me started on the Psion 5mx...
|
| Still have it, last time I checked it worked well.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| 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?
| endemic wrote:
| I liked it because it was very fast (I would always demo the
| startup time vs. Windows) and had a clean, macOS-inspired UI.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Super responsive--running 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.
| rjrjrjrj wrote:
| 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:
| ^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
| rjrjrjrj wrote:
| I think I'm remembering this correctly - couldn't you
| move the window while the video inside continued to play?
| ranger_danger wrote:
| 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.
| vondur wrote:
| 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.
| lproven wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/11/haiku_beta_4/
|
| 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.
|
| https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorldMagazine/PC.
| ..
|
| But it still had almost no apps and while Microsoft could not
| prevent OEMs installing it, it could prevent them from
| installing a bootloader:
|
| https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/
|
| Be sued.
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2002/02/20/be_inc_sues_microsoft.
| ..
|
| 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.
|
| https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/55562.html
|
| 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.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Looks like you are a "harbinger of failure", like me. I have
| this fondness for products that ultimately fail.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| > It's 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
| https://v-os.dev/img/photogrid.png
|
| -- When words have no meaning
| numerio wrote:
| 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
| add2 wrote:
| How about making Haiku frameworks OS independent?
| Findecanor wrote:
| 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] https://v-os.dev/blog/2026/02/10/haiku-runtime-on-linux/
| numerio wrote:
| 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.
| s1mn wrote:
| 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.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| 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.
| carlesfe wrote:
| 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. Even though it had limitations, it had this "clean polished
| feeling"
| hypercube33 wrote:
| 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.
| tecleandor wrote:
| Related interview with VitruvianOS dev:
|
| https://www.desktoponfire.com/interview/846/an-interview-wit...
| prmoustache wrote:
| Anyone remember BlueEyedOS? It had exactly the main goal,
| building a beos compatible OS on top of the Linux kernel.
| hencq wrote:
| 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.
| aryonoco wrote:
| Little known fact, a small piece of BeOS survives to this day and
| is an integral part of Android
|
| BeOS came up with "Binder" 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:
| Another thing that survives is that they wrote Java as if
| writing C++ with m_ prefixes, and several other Cisms, which
| prevail to today.
| numerio wrote:
| 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!
| rubymamis wrote:
| Can someone list what are some cool/novel BeOS features that
| other OSes didn't have at the time and maybe still don't have?
| _spduchamp wrote:
| BeOS had the BEST icons.
| Findecanor wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40196333
| flippyhead wrote:
| Even if the cheaps are weak... is the code strong?
| weli wrote:
| 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.
| kriro wrote:
| My favorite part of BeOS is the file system. The book can be
| found freely here: https://www.nobius.org/dbg/
| nathell wrote:
| I almost overlooked this, and then when I didn't, I almost
| dismissed this as Yet Another Linux Distro with a custom skin.
| But no, there's novelty and exploration in here. There's attempt
| to venture off the local maximum. This is a breath of fresh air.
| vibbix wrote:
| 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!)
| mac3n wrote:
| 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.
| egorfine wrote:
| With age verification built in, right? right?
| Redster wrote:
| I'm not getting enough sleep. I read this as ViltrumiteOS. I
| haven't even watched Invincibles.
| radiator wrote:
| _what we've 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.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Cosmoe, a similar project that supports running Haiku apps on
| Linux, has also been recently revived after 18 years:
| https://pappp.net/?p=95060
|
| 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.
| kev009 wrote:
| 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.
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