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.

Late 90s visual design for operating systems - in particular Mac OS 8 and BeOS - is peak OS design. Aesthetically pleasing and a very clear, highly readable visual language based on well-researched human interface guidelines.

It was uphill all the way before that point, and downhill ever since.

I find it soothing. There is ornamentation in its design, but it's precise and minimal, but also friendly. The icons, in particular, look so good.