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VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS

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Re: VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS

#151

Post by diskzero »

pndy wrote: post #57
WD-42 wrote: post #25

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 so…

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.

Re: VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS

#152

Post by diskzero »

kannanvijayan wrote: post #124
pndy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

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 mov…

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.

Yes and no. The core of the purchase decision was really based on the technology. Ellen Hancock (Apple's CTO at the time) actually did a decent analysis of BeOs and NeXTStep. She was actually against some aspects of the purchase, and was not in favor of Be. She was also not in favor of the NeXT kernel. It is painful to say as a Be employee at the time, but Be internals were fragile, some technologies were very shallow, the kernel was brittle and under constant churn and we had big problems with our decision to have a C++ API. Gil Amelio liked Steve and Steve did a good job selling both a vision and the NeXT technology. BeOs was a really cool demo that was getting pulled into the direction of a real OS but had a long, long way to go. There actually was a possibility that Apple could have also gotten the Be code, but the board didn't go for it. As it turned out, most of the primary BeOs developers ended up at Apple via Eazel. The ones that didn't ended up at Google via Danger Research/Android.

Re: VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS

#153

Post by tvaughan »

limagnolia wrote: post #141
conception wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

OS/2 Warp was out before Windows 95, and better.

Re: VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS

#154

Post by numerio »

shevy-java wrote: post #53

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 wayl…

the cli stuff in Vitruvian are exactly the same you'd get on a debian install. So it'd just work out of the box on our OS.

Re: VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS

#155

Post by pjmlp »

tvaughan wrote: post #153
limagnolia wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OS/2 Warp was out before Windows 95, and better.

If we ignore the fact that it required 1000 euros more in additional hardware, thus most folks went with DOS/Windows 3.x instead, and when Windows 95 came around it was already too late for adoption.

Re: VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS

#156

Post by pjmlp »

cpuguy83 wrote: post #136
pjmlp wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mostly relevant for folks on macOS, and I skip on it when using Mac anyway rather using UNIX and SDK tools in the box, so kind of debatable.

Re: VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS

#158

Post by pjmlp »

aryonoco wrote: post #108

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…

Another thing that survives is that they wrote Java as if writing C++ with m_ prefixes, and several other Cisms, which prevail to today.

Re: VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS

#159

Post by MarsIronPI »

yason wrote: post #54

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.

I'm too young to remember BeOS but I've taken a superficial look at Haiku and I don't get the hype. What made BeOS so special? How is it different from GNU/Linux or BSDs?

Re: VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS

#160

Post by hencq »

prmoustache wrote: post #103

Anyone remember BlueEyedOS? It had exactly the main goal, building a beos compatible OS on top of the Linux kernel.

Yes! I was racking my brain trying to remember what it was called. Back in the early 2000s I ran BeOS on my desktop and absolutely loved it. Then when they went under, I followed the effort to come up with an open source version with guest interest. There was one effort that wanted to build everything from scratch. That's what was later renamed into Haiku (I think initially openBeOS maybe?). There was also BlueEyedOS who thought you could get there faster by building on Linux and X11.

I think Haiku got more traction because at the time people felt that it should run BeOS software without recompiling. I have long wondered what would have happened if BlueEyedOS would have gotten most of the effort.

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