alt.hn

3/25/2026 at 3:17:06 AM

VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS

 https://v-os.dev

by felixding

3/25/2026 at 7:59:25 AM

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.

by yason

3/25/2026 at 10:24:22 AM

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?

by peterashford

3/25/2026 at 9:53:02 AM

I had to read this message twice, gotcha

by makach

3/25/2026 at 10:11:11 AM

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.

by carlesfe

3/25/2026 at 10:15:44 AM

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

by dainiusse

3/25/2026 at 5:36:10 AM

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.

by rebolek

3/25/2026 at 7:51:55 AM

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 !

by 10729287

3/25/2026 at 9:14:01 AM

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.

by hnlmorg

3/25/2026 at 5:58:42 AM

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

by pjmlp

3/25/2026 at 10:02:04 AM

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

by akho

3/25/2026 at 6:55:58 AM

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.

by AlecSchueler

3/25/2026 at 7:05:24 AM

But Vitruvian is running its own graphics stack so no X11 or wayland applications will run afaict.

by c-c-c-c-c

3/25/2026 at 9:11:15 AM

So what's the point of this -- it's essentially a different Haiku?

by reverius42

3/25/2026 at 7:51:45 AM

With xlibe they should.

by anthk

3/25/2026 at 6:58:31 AM

Maybe the fallacy is not exploring what a given OS is great at?

We don't need to clone UNIX all over the place.

by pjmlp

3/25/2026 at 9:10:07 AM

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 ;)

by hnlmorg

3/25/2026 at 8:00:34 AM

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).

by shevy-java

3/25/2026 at 8:31:24 AM

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.

by pjmlp

3/25/2026 at 9:14:42 AM

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.

by rebolek

3/25/2026 at 4:32:37 AM

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.

by watersb

3/25/2026 at 10:26:29 AM

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.

by zozbot234

3/25/2026 at 5:53:11 AM

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...

by donatj

3/25/2026 at 8:30:42 AM

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

by msk-lywenn

3/25/2026 at 9:06:03 AM

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

by nunodonato

3/25/2026 at 9:03:40 AM

There's no equivalent on Wayland?

by guerrilla

3/25/2026 at 9:03:16 AM

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

by guerrilla

3/25/2026 at 9:47:29 AM

[dead]

by numerio

3/25/2026 at 10:05:58 AM

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.

by vanderZwan

3/25/2026 at 6:21:18 AM

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

by WD-42

3/25/2026 at 8:15:18 AM

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.

by pndy

3/25/2026 at 5:19:29 AM

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

by thisislife2

3/25/2026 at 7:31:16 AM

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.

by rcarmo

3/25/2026 at 9:48:07 AM

[dead]

by numerio

3/25/2026 at 5:49:59 AM

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

by nico

3/25/2026 at 6:17:26 AM

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.

by silisili

3/25/2026 at 5:53:25 AM

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

by eightman

3/25/2026 at 6:59:15 AM

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.

by AlecSchueler

3/25/2026 at 7:30:49 AM

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.

by pjmlp

3/25/2026 at 6:53:31 AM

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…)

by setopt

3/25/2026 at 7:34:10 AM

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.

by ab5tract

3/25/2026 at 7:42:14 AM

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.

by panick21_

3/25/2026 at 7:43:20 AM

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.

by ErroneousBosh

3/25/2026 at 6:58:41 AM

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

by innocentoldguy

3/25/2026 at 9:40:51 AM

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.

by s1mn

3/25/2026 at 5:20:14 AM

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

by aaronbrethorst

3/25/2026 at 7:21:54 AM

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!

by danwills

3/25/2026 at 5:23:29 AM

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

by ianlevesque

3/25/2026 at 5:28:02 AM

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

by aaronbrethorst

3/25/2026 at 6:13:27 AM

Why should users not instead go for Haiku

by unixhero

3/25/2026 at 6:16:27 AM

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.

by jonhohle

3/25/2026 at 6:54:14 AM

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

by Gabrys1

3/25/2026 at 7:31:17 AM

You mean Electron apps.

by pjmlp

3/25/2026 at 7:21:47 AM

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?

by clayhacks

3/25/2026 at 7:24:08 AM

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

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

by lobf

3/25/2026 at 7:39:06 AM

stick around...

by gjvc

3/25/2026 at 5:38:21 AM

"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.

by ofrzeta

3/25/2026 at 7:26:38 AM

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.

by worthless-trash

3/25/2026 at 9:51:22 AM

[dead]

by numerio

3/25/2026 at 8:50:40 AM

[dead]

by hrmtst93837

3/25/2026 at 6:25:46 AM

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

by jazzyjackson

3/25/2026 at 7:46:53 AM

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

by dddw

3/25/2026 at 9:09:41 AM

How about making Haiku frameworks OS independent?

by add2

3/25/2026 at 4:26:10 AM

More context here:

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

by arm

3/25/2026 at 5:06:54 AM

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

by unixhero

3/25/2026 at 5:00:43 AM

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

by unmole

3/25/2026 at 6:29:07 AM

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.

by jonhohle

3/25/2026 at 6:43:52 AM

It runs haiku apps through a compatibility layer

by riffraff

3/25/2026 at 9:53:32 AM

[dead]

by numerio

3/25/2026 at 4:54:35 AM

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

by asadm

3/25/2026 at 8:12:39 AM

> 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

by lnxg33k1

3/25/2026 at 9:55:37 AM

[dead]

by numerio

3/25/2026 at 7:56:48 AM

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).

by shevy-java

3/25/2026 at 6:07:40 AM

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/

by KnuthIsGod

3/25/2026 at 9:44:02 AM

Because they're enthusiastic engineers. Not marketing people.

by 28304283409234

3/25/2026 at 4:52:04 AM

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

by leke

3/25/2026 at 6:25:00 AM

Well, it can't run X or Wayland apps, so I wouldn't call it an alternative to those. An alternative to Haiku maybe.

by tadfisher

3/25/2026 at 6:55:09 AM

why no X11?

by Gabrys1

3/25/2026 at 7:45:35 AM

Because everyone's going for Wayland, even though you still need XWayland to do anything useful on it because Wayland is comically incomplete.

by ErroneousBosh