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Having set up my main lame 600MHz machine to multiboot Win9x, Win2K, Mandrake 9 & BeOS, (QNX RTP will be next) I spend a similar amount of time in the latter 3 and find they each have their merits and faults that keeps me multi booting.

Windows 2K is just a hard habit to break because its got all the apps I want. VC++ MFC was great to develop with but it now seems time to move on. Pet peeve is that mp3/ogg files glitch badly during dialup / disconnect when they are starved of CPU cycles. Even though Lucent Win modems are controller based, the're crappy drivers rob the CPU 100%.

Linux is rock solid and has made great strides in many ways. Its fun to explore all the alternate desktops environments and the huge wealth of apps. Even KDE is not too sluggish for me, however the mp3/ogg playback is unacceptabley glitchy especially when just moving windows & UI widgets. Linux distros are a configurators dream, you can have it any way you like.

BeOS is also rock solid and really lives up to its media OS claim. It still takes my breathe away when I demo it playing multiple mpegs in large overlapping windows plus multiple ogg/mp3 streams with no audio glitches, all while dialing that Winmodem and dragging windows around. BeOS makes my lame & lamer PCs rock but for the chronic app shortage. The posix compliant shell is much appreciated. The file Tracker has nice plugin expandability but its one pane view makes it harder to learn an unfamiliar folder hierarchy, so I prefer the Explorer & Konquerer browsers with separate panes for the folder tree view and file view. Kudos to DarkWyrm for picking up development of the Pioneer explorer now called Seeker. It is improving rapidly and its a must have app.

BeOS like Linux is probably much better appreciated outside of the US even though it's much less internationalised. Much of the world can & does make good use of older PCs and SW developers are plentiful in many countries.
The Linux community is generally consistant about the importance of choice, and OSS / Linux developers enjoy the kudos of contributing code. With the BeOS becoming OSS, I would not be suprised if a small number of OSS / Linux developers become interested in developing for the OBOS variants for curiousity, diversity and that same kudos. Even if OpenBeOS just remains a marginal OS, it still provides another vital OS choice that is much different to anything else and has no inclination to mimic Win98,XP (ignoring that sneaked in window decoration mode BeOS / Mac / Amiga / Win98).

On the subject of boot times, my ranking is Win95, BeOS, WinME, then Linux (4X Win95), and eventually Win2K (6x Win95 when its not discovering HW changes or 10-20x if discovering changes). Actual measurements are too embarrassing compared to current PCs.

OT 1) For those who tried a BeOS install that froze during bootup and want to try evaluating it again, did you know about the safe mode ?. Just as the BIOS gets done with POST, hit the space bar quickly before it has a chance to show the intro purple graphic logo screen. Pick safe mode options, then check relevant boxes. I've only ever checked "Don't call BIOS" and "Use fail-safe video mode" after changing a video card.

OT 2) If you are interested in multibooting 4 or more OSs per drive then XOSL (Extended OS Loader www.xosl.org) is very slick, very configurable and OSS.

OK thats my 2c
Brian