VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS

https://v-os.dev

by felixding • 4 months ago

366 226 4 months ago

v-os.dev

arm• 4 months ago

More context here:

https://v-os.dev/news/vitruvian-0.3.0-available/

unmole• 4 months ago

I don't see any actual context, just vacuous slop.

unixhero2• 4 months ago

Ah yes! It is human at the center. Now things are starting to make sense.

watersb• 4 months 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 — 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• 4 months ago

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_pawn4• 4 months 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.

numerio13• 4 months 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.

leke2• 4 months ago

So this is a lighter weight alternative to other Linux desktops?

tadfisher• 4 months 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.

Gabrys13• 4 months ago

why no X11?

ranger_danger4• 4 months ago

https://github.com/X547/wayland-server

asadm• 4 months ago

is there a debian distro that is close to win98. Sorta like ReactOS but can be daily-driven.

kube-system• 4 months ago

Try this:

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

xfce4• 4 months ago

install it on devuan and you'll be fine

thisislife2• 4 months ago

This is interesting - a Linux distro that really differentiates itself technically, instead of just having a different GUI / desktop environment.

Yaggo• 4 months 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 — making it
    possible to run Haiku applications on a standard Linux kernel.

aaronbrethorst2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

To be fair that's one more corner than Tahoe.

aaronbrethorst2• 4 months ago

Touché, and such a good reminder why everyone should wait for macOS 27.

danwills• 4 months 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!

bandie91• 4 months 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.

lproven4• 4 months ago

There's a Windows app I used to use that supports the same kind of thing for Windows

Taekwindow:

https://ttencate.github.io/taekwindow/

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.

rebolek2• 4 months ago

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.

pjmlp11• 4 months ago

And much better option, running the real deal, instead of some compatibility layer.

AlecSchueler2• 4 months 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.

shevy-java2• 4 months 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).

akho• 4 months ago

I suspect Linux has better hardware support than Haiku, which is not exactly easy to run on laptop hardware (w/ wifi, sleep, &c)

107292872• 4 months 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 !

hnlmorg2• 4 months ago

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.

hym_the_pawn4• 4 months 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.

leke2• 4 months ago

I'm so confused right now.

ofrzeta• 4 months 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-trash2• 4 months 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.

numerio13• 4 months 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.

nico• 4 months 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

eightman• 4 months ago

https://www.haiku-os.org/

AlecSchueler2• 4 months 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.

silisili• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

setopt• 4 months 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 bankrupt…)

ab5tract• 4 months 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.

panick21_• 4 months 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.

innocentoldguy• 4 months ago

I just found my BeOS 5 and BeProductive CDs from the late 90s. I wish I had something to run them on.

mlhpdx• 4 months 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?

pjmlp11• 4 months 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.

ErroneousBosh2• 4 months 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.

donatj• 4 months 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):

https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/images/gui-images...

msk-lywenn• 4 months ago

I used to run fluxbox in the early 2000s. I greatly miss tabbing any windows like that.

guerrilla2• 4 months ago

There's no equivalent on Wayland?

nunodonato• 4 months ago

me too! fluxbox and gkrellm for some kick ass desktop "widgets" monitoring the computer :D

Zardoz84• 4 months ago

KDE had it. And I missed it a lot.

gedy• 4 months ago

I believe the Cosmic Desktop from Pop OS has that again

malicka• 4 months ago

You can run fluxbox today! I still do, I can’t go without window tabs. :^)

guerrilla2• 4 months ago

This is what we needed in our OSes instead of Firefox tabs.

Schlagbohrer• 4 months ago

How is it that different?

numerio13• 4 months ago

Yes the UX is virtually the same

samtheDamned• 4 months ago

I tried to install a quick VM to answer this exact question but I had some difficult getting it running in Gnome Boxes.

KnuthIsGod• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

Because they're enthusiastic engineers. Not marketing people.

unixhero2• 4 months ago

Why should users not instead go for Haiku

jonhohle2• 4 months ago

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.

Gabrys13• 4 months 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

pjmlp11• 4 months ago

You mean Electron apps.

WD-42• 4 months ago

UI elements that have depth look so mouth-wateringly good now. So over the minimalism and bouncing back hard.

pndy• 4 months 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.

kannanvijayan2• 4 months 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.

diskzero2• 4 months 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.

InsideOutSanta• 4 months 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.

716dpl• 4 months 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.

jazzyjackson2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

Do share a screenshot if you do. What refreshrate do you have on that display?

blacklion2• 4 months 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.

jonhohle2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

It runs haiku apps through a compatibility layer

numerio13• 4 months 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.

Findecanor3• 4 months 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 ...)

clayhacks• 4 months ago

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?

lobf2• 4 months ago

I don't understand this type of helplessness when you're already competent enough to use HN...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS

gjvc• 4 months ago

stick around...

ranger_danger4• 4 months 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.

lproven4• 4 months ago

Ok maybe I’m too young, but what is BeOS?

Does this help?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520510

rcarmo• 4 months ago

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.

numerio13• 4 months ago

it's the real app_server running :) so you have everything you'd expect

shevy-java2• 4 months 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).

numerio13• 4 months 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.

yason2• 4 months 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.

makach• 4 months ago

I had to read this message twice, gotcha

peterashford• 4 months 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?

prmoustache2• 4 months 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.

yason2• 4 months 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.

danans• 4 months 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.

chocochunks• 4 months ago

I think I did this with phones. WebOS, BB10, Windows Phone 7 & 8. All dead lol.

BirAdam4• 4 months 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.

cgk1951• 4 months 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".

jvictor118• 4 months 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!

JamesonNetworks• 4 months 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 Sam’s display computer in the pre-internet days

mech422• 4 months 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 https://genode.org/

erremerre• 4 months 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.

jnovek• 4 months ago

They should have me do that with television programs.

mgerdts• 4 months ago

You aren’t alone:

https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/working-defini...

henry_bone• 4 months 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.

conception• 4 months ago

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• 4 months 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.

chem83• 4 months 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.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_Flora_Prius * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44217322

hbbio• 4 months ago

Don't get me started on the Psion 5mx...

Still have it, last time I checked it worked well.

MarsIronPI2• 4 months 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?

endemic• 4 months 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.

mixmastamyk• 4 months ago

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.

rjrjrjrj2• 4 months 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.

lproven4• 4 months 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.

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.

adastra22• 4 months 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 didn’t really exist, Apple’s OS was System 7.5, Microsoft’s was Windows 95. BeOS was a preemptively multitasking, multimedia operating system, with a transactional file system. Nothing else like it existed, at that time.

WesolyKubeczek• 4 months ago

Looks like you are a “harbinger of failure”, like me. I have this fondness for products that ultimately fail.

lnxg33k1• 4 months ago

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

numerio13• 4 months 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

add2• 4 months ago

How about making Haiku frameworks OS independent?

Findecanor3• 4 months 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] https://v-os.dev/blog/2026/02/10/haiku-runtime-on-linux/

numerio13• 4 months 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.

s1mn• 4 months 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.

vanderZwan• 4 months 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.

carlesfe• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

+1. Even though it had limitations, it had this "clean polished feeling"

hypercube33• 4 months 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.

tecleandor• 4 months ago

Related interview with VitruvianOS dev:

https://www.desktoponfire.com/interview/846/an-interview-wit...

prmoustache2• 4 months ago

Anyone remember BlueEyedOS? It had exactly the main goal, building a beos compatible OS on top of the Linux kernel.

hencq• 4 months 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.

lproven4• 4 months ago

A later successor was Cosmoe:

https://gitlab.com/haydentech/cosmoe-classic/

This has evolved into a new UI layer for Wayland, on top of Linux...

https://cosmoe.org/index.html

I wrote about it last year:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/25/cosmoe_new_cpp_toolki...

aryonoco• 4 months ago

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.

pjmlp11• 4 months 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.

numerio13• 4 months 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!

rubymamis• 4 months ago

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?

numerio13• 4 months ago

with BeOS you have instant indexed search, with no index server, and with atomic instant updates (e.g. the same moment you modify a file, the search results update) this is yet to be seen, and we are planning to implement it on Vitruvian

_spduchamp2• 4 months ago

BeOS had the BEST icons.

Findecanor3• 4 months 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40196333

flippyhead• 4 months ago

Even if the cheaps are weak... is the code strong?

weli• 4 months 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.

numerio13• 4 months ago

it's like a port of Haiku on top of the linux kernel roughly

kriro• 4 months ago

My favorite part of BeOS is the file system. The book can be found freely here: https://www.nobius.org/dbg/

nathell• 4 months ago

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• 4 months 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!)

mac3n• 4 months 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.

egorfine• 4 months ago

With age verification built in, right? right?

Redster• 4 months ago

I'm not getting enough sleep. I read this as ViltrumiteOS. I haven't even watched Invincibles.

radiator• 4 months ago

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_danger4• 4 months ago

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• 4 months 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.

0x80h• 4 months ago

This is pure nostalgia. What a fantastic time playing with BeOS :)

voidfunc• 4 months ago

Very interesting. Wonder if this can run Proton for gaming... this looks about perfect.

a-dub• 4 months ago

does preempt_rt actually confer a ui responsiveness benefit on multicore systems?

ginkgotree• 4 months ago

I installed BeOS in the 90s as a kid. It was awesome, and I love seeing this.

markus_zhang2• 4 months ago

Tangible:

Talking about BeOS, this is the most fantastic piece of technological fiction I read about:

https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue4-8.h...

pelasaco2• 4 months ago

systemd based?

voxelghost• 4 months ago

hym_the_pawn4• 4 months ago

Yes.

pelasaco2• 4 months ago

lol yes/no/cancel?

VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS

Related Stories