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 !

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.

I was probably younger than you, and on the family computer. Couldn't make what I want and mess with booting back then ! I remember trying the PE edition through windows but couldn't install it.

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

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.

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

With xlibe they should.

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

I think itbis the reverse, it is haiku with a linux kernel so it works with more hardware.

Not quite really. Vitruvian runs virtually the same identical sw stack of Haiku and there's a haiku-wayland that works. However on vitruvian the app_server could provide real Gbm buffers, so that would give us pretty much native rendering. We're still working on it but you'd have the advantages of a BeOS-like gui and the power of linux!

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

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

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 ;)

It certainly is, what it is not, is a derivative.

BeOS on its final commercial version certainly did not allow to compile UNIX applications, beyond the common surface that is part of ISO C and ISO C++ standard library.

VitruvianOS has the clothes of BeOS, which is nice and refreshing.

But Haiku has the soul.

In Haiku windowing system, each app window gets its own thread so dialog boxes run in a different thread to the main window and a different thread to the core app. In Linux, all windows share the same message loop thread. A simple port reveals threading issues in Haiku which dont exist on Linux.

To work around this, all window messages in ported apps are marshalled to execute sequentially. Small additional overhead, and the system doesnt spread available threads, so noticably slower.

Compare a native Haiku app with a ported app, one is smooth as ice while the other isnt. Users notice it. This is on many core systems.

> In Linux, all windows share the same message loop thread.

I'm no expert, but aren't you just talking about Xorg here? As far as my limited knowledge goes, there's nothing inherent in the Wayland protocol that would imply this.

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).

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.

Homebrew wouldn't support Haiku anyway.

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.

Debatable because you don't use it?

Maybe 5% of what I use Ruby for is on the server. I'd suggest those of us who use Ruby client side are likely to outnumber Haiku users by magnitude or two.

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.

> I've been looking at it for many years - they are simply unable to leave the dream era.

Sit down and do the work needed to get Ruby running properly on Haiku instead of sitting here complaining and basically admitting that you're just being a noisy spectator... On HackerNews, no less.

Huh, PHP works on Haiku, and there aren't even that many #ifdefs for it in the source. If a language can be ported to Windows, Haiku should be a no-brainer. Seems more a matter of having someone interested in maintaining the port, and I think it ultimately just points to the size of Haiku's userbase being a rounding error.

> And things such as ruby don't work on it.

What doesn't work about it? We have Ruby in the software repositories, and Ruby is required to build WebKit (and we build WebKit on Haiku), so clearly it works for that much at least. I don't see any open tickets at HaikuPorts about bugs in the port, either.

What does not work? You can install Ruby version 3.2.9 (2025-07-24) with a point-and-click package manager HaikuDepot and it works perfectly fine.

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

Yeah, a good opportunity to contribute upstream.

I suspect it was a freak occurence, but I actually had incredible luck running Haiku on an old laptop back in the day. It was incredibly fast, and just about all the amenities you'd expect worked with no or minimal intervention.

In the last year sometime I ran the Haiku live image off USB on my only laptop (2011 X201t), it worked fairly well.

Even running from an HDD?

I recently tried the latest version (Beta 5?) on a 2005-ish PC with an even older HDD and it ran surprisingly fast off that. The only thing where it was somewhat slow was web browsing.

Yeah. I installed it to HDD and it worked great. You'd think the thing had an SSD ot was so snappy. No issues with compat on the drive or anything.

Me too. The laptop was so old that I couldn't play a 360p mpg video without pauses on Windows 2K or XFCE, but it ran smoothly with BeOS5 (the Intel-based abandonware version)

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

So true. I had an old Dell Latitude D620, 3GB/500GB, 1.66ghz Intel Core Duo Processor and it was sound that tripped me up. Haiku was lightning fast on this machine.

I think that eventually I might've gotten sound to work but... this was many years ago and the laptop was mostly for testing light-weight distros on modest hardware.

Maybe, but at some point you're duct-taping 90s driver hacks just to run Haiku on modern hardware unless you enjoy daily spelunking in kernel panics.

Vitruvian can potentially have everything Haiku has (it's the same identical stack BTW) but with the power of linux. It's cool if people could start to appreciate both visions.

I'm so confused right now.