I don't see any actual context, just vacuous slop.
unixhero•Mar 25, 2026
Ah yes! It is human at the center. Now things are starting to make sense.
watersb•Mar 25, 2026
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.
leke•Mar 25, 2026
So this is a lighter weight alternative to other Linux desktops?
tadfisher•Mar 25, 2026
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•Mar 25, 2026
why no X11?
ErroneousBosh•Mar 25, 2026
Because everyone's going for Wayland, even though you still need XWayland to do anything useful on it because Wayland is comically incomplete.
asadm•Mar 25, 2026
is there a debian distro that is close to win98. Sorta like ReactOS but can be daily-driven.
This is interesting - a Linux distro that really differentiates itself technically, instead of just having a different GUI / desktop environment.
aaronbrethorst•Mar 25, 2026
Vitruvian asks a different question: what would I actually want to do with my computer that I currently can’t?
Only be able to drag a window around the screen from the top left corner
ianlevesque•Mar 25, 2026
To be fair that's one more corner than Tahoe.
aaronbrethorst•Mar 25, 2026
Touché, and such a good reminder why everyone should wait for macOS 27.
danwills•Mar 25, 2026
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!
rebolek•Mar 25, 2026
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.
pjmlp•Mar 25, 2026
And much better option, running the real deal, instead of some compatibility layer.
AlecSchueler•Mar 25, 2026
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.
pjmlp•Mar 25, 2026
Maybe the fallacy is not exploring what a given OS is great at?
We don't need to clone UNIX all over the place.
c-c-c-c-c•Mar 25, 2026
But Vitruvian is running its own graphics stack so no X11 or wayland applications will run afaict.
anthk•Mar 25, 2026
With xlibe they should.
shevy-java•Mar 25, 2026
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).
pjmlp•Mar 25, 2026
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.
10729287•Mar 25, 2026
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 !
ofrzeta•Mar 25, 2026
"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•Mar 25, 2026
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.
nico•Mar 25, 2026
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
I love Haiku but I feel it's quite different than where BeOS would be today had BeOS continued to exist. In that alternative world there might have been considerably more influence from BeOS going into the rest of the industry much sooner, and that effect could have snowballed.
silisili•Mar 25, 2026
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.
setopt•Mar 25, 2026
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•Mar 25, 2026
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_•Mar 25, 2026
I think at the time everybody agree that BeOS would need a whole lot more work put into it compared to NeXT. That said it still took a huge amount of work to evolve NeXT to OSX.
So I can well imagine Apple fucking this up and getting aquired.
innocentoldguy•Mar 25, 2026
I just found my BeOS 5 and BeProductive CDs from the late 90s. I wish I had something to run them on.
pjmlp•Mar 25, 2026
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.
ErroneousBosh•Mar 25, 2026
You can pretty much just use Haiku as a daily driver these days, if your demands aren't too great. It runs really well on older hardware too.
And of course you can just spin it up in a VM if you only want to play a bit.
donatj•Mar 25, 2026
The important question becomes can you stack the window decoration "tabs" of different apps into a single stack of tabs like in BeOS?
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.
pjmlp•Mar 25, 2026
You mean Electron apps.
WD-42•Mar 25, 2026
UI elements that have depth look so mouth-wateringly good now. So over the minimalism and bouncing back hard.
pndy•Mar 25, 2026
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.
jazzyjackson•Mar 25, 2026
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•Mar 25, 2026
Do share a screenshot if you do. What refreshrate do you have on that display?
jonhohle•Mar 25, 2026
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•Mar 25, 2026
It runs haiku apps through a compatibility layer
clayhacks•Mar 25, 2026
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•Mar 25, 2026
I don't understand this type of helplessness when you're already competent enough to use HN...
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.
shevy-java•Mar 25, 2026
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).
yason•Mar 25, 2026
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.
lnxg33k1•Mar 25, 2026
> 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
20 Comments
https://v-os.dev/news/vitruvian-0.3.0-available/
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.
https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
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!
We don't need to clone UNIX all over the place.
Then again, there is a golden opportunity to become a Ruby contributor, road to fame on Ruby contribution list.
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 don't know exactly why, but child me thought that was so interesting, since every other OS at the time seemed unable to.
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.
Another cool one that was around was QNX.
And of course you can just spin it up in a VM if you only want to play a bit.
Demonstrated here (animated):
https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/images/gui-images...
"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/
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
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.
> 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