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If it doesn't do what I want though I may end up getting Photoshop CS3, which you can't get running on Linux without jumping through hoops.

Before going CS3 I'd recommend giving Pixelmator a try. It isn't quite ready to replace Photoshop yet for my needs but it is a very good start and I look forward to the day it can.

As for CS3 itself I was rather disappointed with it coming from PS7 on Windows XP to CS3 on OS 10.4. The interface behaves differently from other Mac applications and the keyboard shortcuts are pretty awful and downright akward to use - not to mention there is hardly any keyboard shortcuts for many things I use frequently. Even worse is the CS3 apps aren't consistent interface or behavior wise between each other. Scroll wheel doesn't scroll the layers box in Illustrator but it does in Photoshop, cmd+` cycles windows in every app except Photoshop were it just does nothing, etc. Considering how much money it costs one would think Adobe could produce a better quality set of applications.

I wish Apple would either buy them [Adobe] or produce their own competing equivalents of Illustrator and Photoshop.

the OS X interface is awful

I guess it depends on your taste. Neither I nor many other Mac users have a problem with it.

There are a few issues that I see frequently brought up by Mac users. The following are the few I consider major and really bother me:

• Keyboard shortcuts do not exist for all menu items and navigating them quickly is not nearly as efficient as in Windows with a dedicated key for each one. The find as you type approach navigating them in OS X requires pressing one key or multiple keys together depending on your shortcuts setup to focus on the menu bar and then typing the first letter or more depending on the names of the menus starting the the same letter(s) or not, pressing return or down, and then repeating as needed. In Windows I just hold one dedicated menu key, alt, and press the underlined letter for each item in the menu which is much less keystrokes and considerably faster.
• The menu bar is fixed on the primary display which doesn't work very well when using applications on secondary displays.
• The dock has a few issues.
• The mouse acceleration curve feels very wrong.
• The lack of any appearance customization aside from graphite or aqua buttons/widgets. I find the UI very bright and all the white/off white begins to burn my eyes with LCDs even with the brightness down very low. Good thing for ctrl+opt+cmd+8 to invert the entire desktop for those long coding or reading sessions.

Despite this I still prefer OS X over both XP and Vista. I was rather disappointed that Leopard didn't so much as address even one of the issues and it seems resolution independence was dropped too. :|

You can use "fsutil" to create hard links.

C:\>fsutil hardlink create /?
Usage : fsutil hardlink create <new filename> <existing filename>
Eg : fsutil hardlink create c:\foo.txt c:\bar.txt

You can't create hard links spanning multiple volumes/filesystems, for the same reasons you can't on other operating systems. You also can't create a hard link to a directory.

Symlinks (junctions or reparse points) are a bit trickier, and made my brain hurt. Seems like you can only use them for directories, not individual files. I think your best bet is to use a SysInternals tool (junction) to manage them. This page has a bunch of information about Windows hard and soft links. This bit is particularly ... odd:

I would kind of like to use symlinks to help manage our software archive (so we can list file it by vendor but also browse the filesystem by category, for example), but now I'm pretty much too scared.

Not quite non-geek, but an amusing read even if you're all over hardlinks, symlinks, etc.: http://shell-shocked.org/article.php?id=284/

XP/2003 have file hard links and 2000 also supports directory simbolic links - I use one to 'alias' my 'home' folder at the root of the C: drive, and it works fine. Check out SysInternal's JUNCTION or XP's FSUTIL. Been doing that for years.

Hardlinks (IIRC, NTFS-only, though that's not much of a problem anymore) are not a replacement for symlinks.

Reparse points are not exactly symlinks.

I always thought of these as the equivalent of "hard links" not symbolic links. Apparently not.

* Files in multiple folders simultaneously

OMG. They have reinvented hard links and symbolic links!

Actually they have implemented a GUI on top of something that has been in NTFS for some time.

Windows Symbolic and Hard Links

Yes it's not well documented. But it is there.

More related links:
http://shell-shocked.org/article.php?id=284
and the nifty GUI tool:
Junction Link Magic

A while back there was an article in 2600 about how to "Hack the Look" of Windows. Take a look at the articles here and here.

A while back there was an article in 2600 about how to "Hack the Look" of Windows. Take a look at the articles here and here.

http://shell-shocked.org/article.php?id=284

you cannot *read shouldn't really* remove the rundll calls to IE, which means no matter how you slice it you've gotta leave a component of IE to use the Explorer shell...

Similar examples would be Gnome and Nautilus. Sure you can remove it, but it's not quite so simple to just install a new shell for 98% of users.

I wasn't about to point the greater majority towards alternative Win32 shells.

If you want to truly remove IE from Explorer You're looking at a task and a half there. I'm personally pretty Ok with using the exploder for file thumbnailing etc.

Removing IE from the exploder shell would be arduous, but it's pretty easy to eliminate Explorer from windows startup and replace it with something open. Still, that little script eliminates the easiest way to instantiate a stealth IE bot eliminating many popup bots ability to annoy, or even run. I couldn't say how many iexplore.exe stealth shells there are out there, but I'm sure google can.

I don't know what ever happened to that "innovation" and I've never heard of anyone doing such a thing in Windows.

Of course Windows has symlinks. Whether or not you want to actually use them is another story.

I've just dealt with something similar. The first step is to go through (manually and painfully) Win32 file associations and make sure nothing points to Internet Explorer. That, and having FF set as the default browser, should significantly reduce the need for IE.

The next step, and one that I have yet to try, is to find a test system and symlink the IE binary to FF. It's a disaster waiting to happen, I know, but I think the experiment itself is worth the effort, let alone any possible success. In case you're wondering how to link in Win32, take a gander here.

Yes... or at least "kinda", not sure. I only used it once, and only to try out Freeciv, so I have no idea how well it works. But they do have screenshots of Windowmaker and and a few other window managers.

And then there're native shell replacements like Litestep, among others.