I used to collect OSes for a while after getting cable, so I'll tell ya: Favorite:BeOS hands down. the whole time I ran it, it crashed one program and NOT the OS. Everthing was easy to use as hell, and you could do almost anything from the right click menu which I love. Con: No drivers at all!!! I have never been able to get cable running on it, even after sneaking looks in the $35 BeOS bible that was at Borders. QNX- was ok but couldn't detect half my stuff (this was almost a year ago)I might try it again. Linuxes: SuSe: The best (obviously! ) 7.2 personal is sooo easy to use and you get real books not that PDF crap you get in other Linuxes. Mandrake: 8.0 was the best of the lot. The newest ones are so slooooww. And it didn't like my soundcard either (crystal) Redhat: a little tougher to use than mandrake, and hated my soundcard too. Redmond: love the solitaire game! Doesn't like my network cards. And the first install screwed up my boot record. Lindows: the preview was a piece of trash! It ran IE5 but crashed when I tried to open Internet options!! The whole system went down!! Winamp doesn't work either,as did not half the programs I threw at it. And they cut the balls off KDE. It isn't nearly as configurable as standard KDE. And control is just KDE control center renamed. It says it as soon as you open it up. Redmond is better, even though it doesn't have the enhanced WINE. Corel: Don't even waste your time. FREE BSD: I tried this once. ONCE. you have to be a hardware engineer just to install it, and a Unix admin to run it. To learn about free BSD go to www.linuxisforbitches.com I will give QNX another try tho. As far as a d/l manager Getright has Multisource (like fasttrack or edonkey-DONKEY forever!!!!!) I got two mandrake ISOs from www.linuxiso.org within two hours with multisourcing on getright. That's 1.3 GB in less than 2 hours!!!!!