I don't think that's entirely fair. Back then I used to be quite an whore when it came to operating systems. I had Windows 2000, Windows 95 (for the rare game that wouldn't run on 2k), BeOS, Linux and Mac OS 9. BeOS was by far the snappiest (actually it was 95, but that was 5 years old by that point, only running DOS games and didn't take advantage of the SMP I was running).
BeOS ran circles around everything else - particularly when multitasking - and I was did use each platform heavily.
Re:What makes BeOS and Haiku unique
by keithnoizu on Sunday December 02, 2018 @09:48PM
(#18586011)
I had a similar experience. Windows 2000, ME, 98 and 95, Suse Linux, BeOS. BeOS was way better at multitasking, video playback, etc. I really lamented it's fall.
In my experience BeOS had much better single, full-resolution video playback or editing experience as well. Editing DV footage on BeOS had a no-stutter experience which took MacOS and Windows another decade to deliver, especially since it was rock-solid under multitasking – not just not needing to close your email client or browser but even things like compiling Mozilla from source didn’t cause a dropped frame.
They chose to show several postage stamp videos because they only had software decoding. At the time the way most competitors handled video on consumer hardware was to decode to YUV and then overlay and scale that with dedicated hardware, and on most systems you could only play one video this way. BeOS would be much worse at that with a software decoder, by showing many videos they could "make a virtue of a necessity" as they say.
The best thing in Haiku is probably their vector icon format, which offers a good mix of basic vector features for small pictures in a compact binary format. It's mentioned briefly in that article.