VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS (opens in new tab)

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

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.

You aren’t alone:

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

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.

They should have me do that with television programs.

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.

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".

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/

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I liked it because it was very fast (I would always demo the startup time vs. Windows) and had a clean, macOS-inspired UI.

> 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.

BeOS was released in October 1995, and Windows 95 was able to play two videos (or more) at one time, with audio from both.

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.

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.

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.

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?

I believe the Cosmic Desktop from Pop OS has that again

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

There's no equivalent on Wayland?

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

KDE had it. And I missed it a lot.

How is it that different?

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

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.

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).

I'm so confused right now.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

"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.

stick around...

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.

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.

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.

why no X11?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

install it on devuan and you'll be fine