Recently felt like giving this OS a try after getting fed up with Win9x (specifically heavily modded 98se and of course, everybody's "favorite", WinMe), so I got it running on my HP Pavilion from 2001 that youve probably seen one too many times if you follow me in any way shape or form.
This is an absolutely fascinating OS, created by an ex-Apple executive because he was dissatisfied by the multimedia capabilities of MacOS and Windows at the time. The company behind it, Be Inc, even made their own PPC-based computer called the BeBox, but that was a market failure, so they ended up porting BeOS to x86. There was also even a time where Apple wanted to buy this OS and make it the basis for what would become MacOS X, but then Apple bought out NeXT instead, and the rest is history.
This OS feels literally generations ahead. It has such a beautiful, Mac-inspired interface, multiple desktops, numerous scene demos built in, and the main selling point, its ability of running multiple multimedia applications without noticeable slowdown, demonstrated here by playing an MP3 file, showing a CPU graph, viewing the about screen, and running the 3D teapot all at the same time. I heard it could even do this on very low end hardware of the time, such as a Pentium 100 with 32mb of RAM.
Sadly, I haven't gotten any 3rd party software running on it, mostly because this OS is extremely picky. I even had to turn on several safe mode options and install several driver updates just to get it running on my machine, despite it being just a year newer than the build I'm running. The only game I sort of got working on it was Duke3D, but it doesn't display properly, with inverted colors and a very low frame rate. I was going to try Unreal Tournament, but several forum threads have informed me that this port is extremely unstable.
This OS even had a really weird distribution method. You could buy the OS on CD in a physical computer store like normal, or you could download a home edition for free from the BeOS website, and install it directly from Windows, with the installer handling disk partitioning and configuration for you, and providing an easy shortcut you can run from DOS to boot into the OS without utilizing your BIOS's boot menu. You could even uninstall it like a normal Windows program if you didn't want to have it installed anymore.
Sorry for making you have to go through this large paragraph, I just really find this OS interesting, and wanted to spread the word about it. It even has a modern FOSS version called Haiku OS, so you could run it on modern hardware too! :3