OSNews

I still use it as my primary OS at home/work (I mostly work from home). I mostly do hosting setup and support, so the majority of my day is spent writing, reading, and replying to EMail. I'd go nuts if I had to use something other than BeMail / mail_daemon again, mostly because I depend so heavily on queries these days (E.g., an always open query for files of type text/email where the status attribute contains "New", and a handful of query templates I've setup so I can quickly search mail by sender, recipient, subject, date, etc).

I'm an obsessive multi-tasker and I've found that, with most OSes, the interface for switching tasks starts to become unweildy once I have about a dozen programs / documents open simultaneously. I find that I can have a lot more going on in BeOS before it starts to become awkward to find a specific window/task. That's largely thanks to Workspaces, they've freed me from the PITA of constantly hiding/unhiding windows, shuffling them around, etc. I make a habit of keeping specific apps/types of documents in specific workspaces and rather than switching between windows, I just switch between workspaes. For me, at least, a dozen workspaces with 2-3 windows each is a lot more manageable than a single workspace with 2-3 dozen windows.

Another reason is that BeOS software tends to be on the minimalist side, and a result is that I've found many basic tasks are less hassle in BeOS that other OSes I've used. The flipside is that sometimes I need to use Windows to E.g. use Filezilla for something I can't do with NetPenguin - but a $40 KVM switch and a second cheap box to run XP has been a pretty workable solution.

I periodically try out the latest Linux live CDs and while there's certainly been worlds of progress since I first tried RH 5.1 back in '99, I still find that many applications/desktop environments have a rather "fragile" feeling to them. Sort of like a brand new house that looks nice, but there's a tendency for the roof to fall off if you slam the front door too hard. The popular desktops and applications available for *nix are undeniably more featureful than their typical counterparts on BeOS, but I find that BeOS and its applications typically feel more solid/mature. I think that's one of the most positive aspects of BeOS, that
the engineers at Be took the time and effort to make damn sure that the basic functionality worked properly before moving onto more interesting territory.