Corel Linux first launched in 1999, from the same company that at the time owned the WordPerfect word processing software. While it was made to compete with Microsoft's Windows it quickly died off.
Yeah I guess that's my fault here that I lived through the 90s starting with windows 3.1. I saw Teleshopping praising and selling the illegal BeOS variant Zeta. But I always found it's dockable windows very cool. Something that no other OS ever did, not even today.
Does it? With Dockable Windows I mean the following: you have a file browser and a text editor and you snap them together so the titlebar acts as a tabbar and you can tab between the file browser and the text editor in the same window.
Tabbing is a nice feature that allows you to tab windows together. This can be combined with the "autogrouping" feature that is provided via the apps-file. This will make certain applications tab together by default.
Tabs can eiher be embedded into the window's titlebar as shown in the upper screenshot or they can appear as little tabs at the outside of a window such as the lower example. The position and size of the outside-tabs is customizable.
It has half yellow titlebars whereas win 95 has full titlebars with a solid blue colour (98+ had a gradient). The Tracker was in the top right corner and didn't extend it's height to the bottom. The Taskbar on the other hand was at the bottom corner and extended from left to right.
Those two differences are already enough to make BeOS NOT look anything alike windows 95.
You're not wrong. KDE 1.x very much aimed at the Win95 market. They even directly targeted the windows userbase with jokes. The ordinal Win95 had a little fly-in animation that said "Where do you want to go today?" with an arrow pointing at the start menu. KDE 1.0 had this too, but it said "tomorrow" instead of "today". Etc.
KDE also stole good ideas from wherever they were found. Trash is thus called because of Apple. The virtual desktops came from CDE. Etc. Sometimes it stole too much, and we would have discussions about flying too close to the sun, and tweak something so it would be just different enough not to raise the ire of lawyers.
Corel Linux was a KDE distro, so it largely had that familiar Win9x look, even if it felt different once you were actually using it. KDE later developed it's own identity, but it retains its history and the baggage that comes with it.