I was allowed to play with a 1980-like shell for like 1 minute. Is there something else I can do?

There's a lot--pretty much a whole OS worth of stuff--but it uses affordances and metaphors that won't be familiar, and it might be a little hard to explore as long as it keeps disconnecting so often.

To be fair, the login screen does warn that it's early days and things might not be ready for prime time.

Things are fairly solid if you install on your own machine... online wasn't stress tested for the kind of load a 'top hacker news' would attract.