Yesterday, I downloaded and installed BeOS on my home PC. It is pretty cool. For one thing, it detected my sound card (on the motherboard, or chipset, or whatever – not a real “card”), which Mandrake 7.0 failed to do. It feels like a slicker, faster, cleaner KDE, or maybe a Mac (simple, bright icons, folders open up in multiple windows), but there’s a UNIX-like shell you can open at any time. It even has vi, and all the UNIX command-line utilities. It’s also free of all of Linux’s multi-user baggage and obscure configuration files. Cool. And it reads both my Windows 2000 & Linux partitions.
On the negative side, the modem doesn’t work yet (I think I need to look in the settings on Linux and copy them), there are very few bundled applications (and I suspect the shareware is also very slim), and I fumbled into the Kernel debugger by running a “find” command on one of my Linux partitions (that’s the Be version of the Blue Screen of Death, I guess).