Ubuntu v. Macintosh and Windows continued

Since writing my first piece on Ubuntu v. Macintosh and Windows I’ve had thousands of visitors to my blog and over a dozen comments. All of the comments have been instructive and constructive in my own growth and I’m grateful for them. I’ve learned more about the Macintosh Pro I use at work and the one I have at home. I’ve learned how to load Xcode to the Macintosh so I can use it at the command line in some ways identical to Ubuntu. I’ve also had ample opportunity to re-examine what I said and what I experienced and Ubuntu still comes out on top. Apple’s got great multimedia tools and I have really enjoyed using them. I have enjoyed using iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes etc. I was an iTunes user on the Windows side before I ever used one of these newer Macs. I’m still prefer Firefox to Safari and OpenOffice.org to anything Microsoft or Apple produce. I’m mostly a Google Docs user but when I need a desktop productivity application I tend to use OpenOffice.org. One of the aspects that concerns about Macs and Windows desktops is the file system. What happens when you lose the GUI on a Mac? I know that the fabled blue screen panics most PC users. I know that ext3 and now ext4 are stable file systems and even if I lose the GUI I can get my files back and in many cases reconfigure X so that I get a GUI back.

What happens when a Mac loses its GUI? What are the advantages of NTFS and HFS? Are they superior to Ext3 or Ext4? One of the greatest gifts I can give to PC users who have been hacked or had their system trashed by a trojan is the use of Linux and Ubuntu in particular to mount their file system and move their important files to relative safety. I’m looking forward to your responses. Thanks in advance.