Thanks for the tip on knoppix/beryl I was leaning toward linux
I use Knoppix daily, and Beryl really livens it up. I was really pumped that somebody ported Beryl over to Knoppix. As for just drooling eye candy, take a look at a Beryl enabled Sabayon box. It'll knock your socks off.
The neat thing about knoppix is you can DL the ISO image, burn a CD, and boot the CD. You don't have to commit to installing Knoppix - you can try it out on any machine with a fair amount of RAM. I've booted it from CD on something as minimal as a 6 year old laptop with 192 MB of memory, and a blazing P-III at 800 Mhz. ;-)
I tried beryl out on a 2.8 GHz P4 with 512MB - very nice.