I've done the FreeBSD thing and I'm currently on macOS. Were you running actual BeOS or Haiku? I wish someone would dump a chunk of money into funding another OS for hardware support.
I was running actual BeOS. This was a long time ago. :) I think it'd be harder to do that with Haiku in modern times; BeOS had a nascent commercial software market for a fleeting moment, so I had a credible "Works" style office suite (GoBe Productive), a good text editor (Pe), a good GUI mail client (Mail-It), a surprisingly good object/bitmap hybrid graphics editor kind of like the old Macromedia Fireworks (e-Picture), and probably other things I'm forgetting. I think I had an AIM client, for instance. Which also dates this. But it was important then!
> I think it'd be harder to do that with Haiku in modern times
Probably, but maybe not for the reasons you would think...
> so I had a credible "Works" style office suite (GoBe Productive)
Haiku has a LibreOffice port.
> a good text editor (Pe),
Pe is still around, or you can use Koder (a new Haiku-native app), Notepadqq, GVim, Kate, ...
> a good GUI mail client (Mail-It)
We have a few mail clients; the native one is alright but could use some work; there is also Trojita and some others like it.
> a surprisingly good object/bitmap hybrid graphics editor kind of like the old Macromedia Fireworks (e-Picture)
e-Picture has gone the way of the dodo (though you probably can still use it on 32-bit Haiku which has BeOS binary compatibility.) You can instead use WonderBrush (a native application), Krita, etc.
I regret not picking up a boxed copy of the office suite at Frys years ago. I still have my installation media for BeOS 4.5 and 5.0. The software I saw was for stuff like stage management. Thanks for sharing!
