>>Is also part of my beef with MS: WTF are they changing always the GUI and usability, but do not offer such basic swiss army knife functionality ? Recovery tools are more important part of the OS than playing hide and seek with menus and links. The defrag routines of XP were not great when compared as to # of options, but they had minimal GUI showing file/disc status. In win7 you get a number - is that # of fragmented blocks or files ? Dumbing down is not a good way IMO, but MS thinks otherwise ? On all large external disks is some backup tool wanting to install ? I want xCopy backup tools, so I am not forced to always save the install with my backups and hope for the best. Win installation concept broken IMO, esp. for system-near tools.
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>MS's philosophy is due to a lot of things, here are some of them:
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>1. Regular users vs. power users. Regular users are 90+% of the population. They don't want to see techy utilities at all. The needs of the many means MS dumbs things down. From what I've seen Apple does the same thing, and Canonical is as well with Unity on Ubuntu (not to mention GNOME3).

Have not looked at latest cats, but you are spot on for the other 2. Canonical strategy unclear: they are following MS in th/dumbing the OS expirience, but what are their real aims? And MS: limiting Fat32 formating size ? Ntfs is better if the host can handle it, Ext is better but MS will not offer THAT, but why not pop up one of their usual infos but allowing a user if he wishes to proceed ? And just having cmd-line linux NtfsUndelete would be enough for most cases, but the others figgered the directory stuff out, so it was not really impossible ;-)

>2. Some built-in utilities like backup (Symantec) and defrag (Execsoft) started out as licensed, feature-limited versions of those other vendors' products. Under the licensing terms MS could not make them more capable.

Symantec authered NT Backup with tape/removable support or the new stuff of Vista and later where MS is in the drivers seat ? Having a backup which is NOT under your control cannot really called backup in my book. And rewriting a defrag GUI should not be THAT difficult, if they let slip such stuff into the contract at all. In MS-Dos times they were sharper ;-)


>I've heard good things about Linux Mint for those who don't want to get experimental UIs imposed on them.

Thx. Will look at the release Lianja uses for their Linux basic install first (when I find the time or am again backed into a corner...) as done that way any problems showing up in Lianja can be checked on identical OS release - I don't plan to make OS a speciality of mine. I just dislike sometimes being told what and how to do things, esp. in dumbed down version... And if I don't like that version, will test Mint or Knoppix again. Libre Office being not that great that I want to switch from my fast Office97 or not totally bloated XP, I think I am after fixes or a host OS with linux mostly as long as workstation is concerned.