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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 ;)
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.
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).
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.
> I've been looking at it for many years - they are simply unable to leave the dream era.
Sit down and do the work needed to get Ruby running properly on Haiku instead of sitting here complaining and basically admitting that you're just being a noisy spectator... On HackerNews, no less.
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 !
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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…)
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.
Jobs worked on NeXT and Jean-Louis Gassée was working on Be. Gassée had brought the world the Macintosh Portable and the IIfx, and he started the Newton project which had the effect of keep ARM alive.
When Gassée left Apple, he took many of Apple's best with him. If we want to know what Apple would have looked like under Gassée, I think it's easier to look at how many products he killed. Much of Apple's leadership was trying to force budget computers like the PC industry was building. Gassée would have none of it. He was focused on exceptionally good hardware married to exceptionally good software, knew the handheld devices would be vital in the future, but he didn't like boring things. I imagine that Apple built around Be would have delivered many of the same things, but wouldn't have become just plain brushed aluminum everywhere.
The curious part would have been the OS. BeOS and NeXT are wildly different.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
You aren’t alone:
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/working-defini...
This is me. It's like a super power.
They should have me do that with television programs.
Don't get me started on the Psion 5mx...
Still have it, last time I checked it worked well.
I think I did this with phones. WebOS, BB10, Windows Phone 7 & 8. All dead lol.
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.
webOS is still around -- sorta! https://www.webosarchive.org
Recently?
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!
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
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?
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.
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.
I had to read this message twice, gotcha
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.
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.
+1. Even though it had limitations, it had this "clean polished feeling"
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.
And much better option, running the real deal, instead of some compatibility layer.
I suspect Linux has better hardware support than Haiku, which is not exactly easy to run on laptop hardware (w/ wifi, sleep, &c)
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.
Even running from an HDD?
Yeah, a good opportunity to contribute upstream.
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.
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.
VitruvianOS has the clothes of BeOS, which is nice and refreshing.
But Haiku has the soul.
But Vitruvian is running its own graphics stack so no X11 or wayland applications will run afaict.
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!
So what's the point of this -- it's essentially a different Haiku?
I think itbis the reverse, it is haiku with a linux kernel so it works with more hardware.
With xlibe they should.
Maybe the fallacy is not exploring what a given OS is great at?
We don't need to clone UNIX all over the place.
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 ;)
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.
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).
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.
> I've been looking at it for many years - they are simply unable to leave the dream era.
Sit down and do the work needed to get Ruby running properly on Haiku instead of sitting here complaining and basically admitting that you're just being a noisy spectator... On HackerNews, no less.
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.
Homebrew would like a word.
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.
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 !
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
I tried to install a quick VM to answer this exact question but I had some difficult getting it running in Gnome Boxes.
I used to run fluxbox in the early 2000s. I greatly miss tabbing any windows like that.
I believe the Cosmic Desktop from Pop OS has that again
There's no equivalent on Wayland?
Sway.
me too! fluxbox and gkrellm for some kick ass desktop "widgets" monitoring the computer :D
KDE had it. And I missed it a lot.
This is what we needed in our OSes instead of Firefox tabs.
How is it that different?
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.
Yes the UX is virtually the same
UI elements that have depth look so mouth-wateringly good now. So over the minimalism and bouncing back hard.
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.
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.
I believe the saying goes that NeXT acquired Apple for -$427 million.
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.
This is interesting - a Linux distro that really differentiates itself technically, instead of just having a different GUI / desktop environment.
Yeah, first I thought this is just a BeOS-inspired GUI theme, but there is more to it:
BeOS had the BEST icons.
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.
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
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.
https://www.haiku-os.org/
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.
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.
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…)
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.
Jobs worked on NeXT and Jean-Louis Gassée was working on Be. Gassée had brought the world the Macintosh Portable and the IIfx, and he started the Newton project which had the effect of keep ARM alive.
When Gassée left Apple, he took many of Apple's best with him. If we want to know what Apple would have looked like under Gassée, I think it's easier to look at how many products he killed. Much of Apple's leadership was trying to force budget computers like the PC industry was building. Gassée would have none of it. He was focused on exceptionally good hardware married to exceptionally good software, knew the handheld devices would be vital in the future, but he didn't like boring things. I imagine that Apple built around Be would have delivered many of the same things, but wouldn't have become just plain brushed aluminum everywhere.
The curious part would have been the OS. BeOS and NeXT are wildly different.
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.
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.
I just found my BeOS 5 and BeProductive CDs from the late 90s. I wish I had something to run them on.
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?
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
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!
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.
To be fair that's one more corner than Tahoe.
Touché, and such a good reminder why everyone should wait for macOS 27.
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?
Even if the cheaps are weak... is the code strong?
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.
it's the real app_server running :) so you have everything you'd expect
Related interview with VitruvianOS dev:
https://www.desktoponfire.com/interview/846/an-interview-wit...
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.
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!
Why should users not instead go for Haiku
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.
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
You mean Electron apps.
Anyone remember BlueEyedOS? It had exactly the main goal, building a beos compatible OS on top of the Linux kernel.
"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.
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.
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.
[dead]
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?
I don't understand this type of helplessness when you're already competent enough to use HN...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
stick around...
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.
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
Do share a screenshot if you do. What refreshrate do you have on that display?
More context here:
https://v-os.dev/news/vitruvian-0.3.0-available/
Ah yes! It is human at the center. Now things are starting to make sense.
I don't see any actual context, just vacuous slop.
How about making Haiku frameworks OS independent?
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/
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.
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.
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 ...)
It runs haiku apps through a compatibility layer
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.
is there a debian distro that is close to win98. Sorta like ReactOS but can be daily-driven.
Try this:
https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
install it on devuan and you'll be fine
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/
Because they're enthusiastic engineers. Not marketing people.
> 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
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
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).
So this is a lighter weight alternative to other Linux desktops?
Well, it can't run X or Wayland apps, so I wouldn't call it an alternative to those. An alternative to Haiku maybe.
why no X11?
Because everyone's going for Wayland, even though you still need XWayland to do anything useful on it because Wayland is comically incomplete.
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
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.