Well, AFAICR at the time (on the same hardware) BeOS ran circles around any Windows OS, including Windows 98 (and besides both NT 4.00 and 2000), particularly with graphics and web/browser.
And (again on same hardware) it was if not faster, much more pleasant to the eye than most Linux distros.
Surely it needed less memory and processor power than the competitors or however felt on limited resources very "snappy".
So what? Windows 95 was terrible. It was just prettier than what came before it, and had a pre-existing library of software that would work with it (i.e. every MSDOS app).
You say those like they aren’t both extremely important things. Windows 95 was the inflection point where desktop personal computers became “accessible” and coincided (despite their detour into MSN) with the commercialization of Internet in a way that bootstrapped our modern world. The computing world of 2019 isn’t perfect, of course, but don’t take it for granted :)
