Normal windows software doesn't work on windows server, especially 2008.

No drivers or support for any pro hardware.

Open Solaris is a better choice.  It's very stable and supports anything out of the box.

I have a workstation for video editing w 2 Xeons and 4 GPUs running on opensolaris.

BeOS is decent too.  The fastest I've ever used.  Still insanely fast 22 years later on my raspberry pi.