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.
yason [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I had to read this message twice, gotcha
rebolek [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
10729287 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I've been a fan of Beos philosophy since the Personal Edition but never had the occasion to run it on steel as I was too poor to have two machines back in the days, and now I miss login/password prompt at boot on Haiku. But i'm following it closely and I hope i'll be able to install it on my X220 for a web/mail machine !
hnlmorg [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
pjmlp [3 hidden]5 mins ago
And much better option, running the real deal, instead of some compatibility layer.
akho [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I suspect Linux has better hardware support than Haiku, which is not exactly easy to run on laptop hardware (w/ wifi, sleep, &c)
AlecSchueler [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
c-c-c-c-c [3 hidden]5 mins ago
But Vitruvian is running its own graphics stack so no X11 or wayland applications will run afaict.
reverius42 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
So what's the point of this -- it's essentially a different Haiku?
guenthert [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Instead of re-implementing BeOS, V/OS "just" tweaked the Linux kernel and re-implemented the parts of BeOS unique to that OS and needed to run BeOS applications ("user space"). They save a lot of work and getting to the point of running BeOS apps quicker by re-using parts developed for Linux (drivers, network stack, etc.).
anthk [3 hidden]5 mins ago
With xlibe they should.
pjmlp [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Maybe the fallacy is not exploring what a given OS is great at?
We don't need to clone UNIX all over the place.
hnlmorg [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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 ;)
shevy-java [3 hidden]5 mins 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).
rebolek [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Getting Rebol running on Haiku was fairly easy task, so I guess it shouldn't be that hard for Ruby too, if someone's willing to do the work.
pjmlp [3 hidden]5 mins ago
People aren't really running servers on Haiku, which is basically the only relevance to use Ruby in 2026, Rails powered web applications.
Then again, there is a golden opportunity to become a Ruby contributor, road to fame on Ruby contribution list.
vanderZwan [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
watersb [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
donatj [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The important question becomes can you stack the window decoration "tabs" of different apps into a single stack of tabs like in BeOS?
I used to run fluxbox in the early 2000s. I greatly miss tabbing any windows like that.
nunodonato [3 hidden]5 mins ago
me too! fluxbox and gkrellm for some kick ass desktop "widgets" monitoring the computer :D
guerrilla [3 hidden]5 mins ago
There's no equivalent on Wayland?
guerrilla [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is what we needed in our OSes instead of Firefox tabs.
s1mn [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
WD-42 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
UI elements that have depth look so mouth-wateringly good now. So over the minimalism and bouncing back hard.
pndy [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
rcarmo [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
thisislife2 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is interesting - a Linux distro that really differentiates itself technically, instead of just having a different GUI / desktop environment.
nico [3 hidden]5 mins 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
silisili [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
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.
pjmlp [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
setopt [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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_ [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
ErroneousBosh [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
innocentoldguy [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I just found my BeOS 5 and BeProductive CDs from the late 90s. I wish I had something to run them on.
aaronbrethorst [3 hidden]5 mins 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
danwills [3 hidden]5 mins 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!
ianlevesque [3 hidden]5 mins ago
To be fair that's one more corner than Tahoe.
aaronbrethorst [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Touché, and such a good reminder why everyone should wait for macOS 27.
clayhacks [3 hidden]5 mins 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?
lobf [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I don't understand this type of helplessness when you're already competent enough to use HN...
"Real-time patched Linux kernel for low-latency desktop use" - does this really make sense? I think there have been various efforts like this over the decades but as far as I remember none of them really made a huge difference for the end user.
worthless-trash [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
unixhero [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Why should users not instead go for Haiku
jonhohle [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
Gabrys1 [3 hidden]5 mins 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
pjmlp [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You mean Electron apps.
add2 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
How about making Haiku frameworks OS independent?
jazzyjackson [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Do share a screenshot if you do. What refreshrate do you have on that display?
Because they're enthusiastic engineers. Not marketing people.
jonhohle [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It runs haiku apps through a compatibility layer
lnxg33k1 [3 hidden]5 mins 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
asadm [3 hidden]5 mins ago
is there a debian distro that is close to win98. Sorta like ReactOS but can be daily-driven.
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).
leke [3 hidden]5 mins ago
So this is a lighter weight alternative to other Linux desktops?
tadfisher [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
Gabrys1 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
why no X11?
ErroneousBosh [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Because everyone's going for Wayland, even though you still need XWayland to do anything useful on it because Wayland is comically incomplete.
HN.zip
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 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.
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.
We don't need to clone UNIX all over the place.
Perhaps it’s better to play it safe and just run DOS instead ;)
Then again, there is a golden opportunity to become a Ruby contributor, road to fame on Ruby contribution list.
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.
Demonstrated here (animated):
https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/images/gui-images...
I'm not cool enough to run VitruvianOS either, but i'm glad it exists.
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 don't know exactly why, but child me thought that was so interesting, since every other OS at the time seemed unable to.
Another cool one that was around was QNX.
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.
So I can well imagine Apple fucking this up and getting aquired.
And of course you can just spin it up in a VM if you only want to play a bit.
Only be able to drag a window around the screen from the top left corner
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!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
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.
https://v-os.dev/news/vitruvian-0.3.0-available/
"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/
> 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
https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95