Samba should make this easy in any distro, but Mandriva has the friendliest configuration tools, in Mandriva Control Center.

As for actually mounting and using your local NTFS partition, the kernel driver is only good for reading NTFS, but there’s a user-mode driver that can write to NTFS as well, called NTFS-3g.

You can probably imagine why this will never be in the kernel, it would invite a Microsoft lawsuit, or add an appearance of legitimacy to Microsoft’s anti-Linux patent FUD/nonsense. As far as user-space drivers go, NTFS-3g performs well, most distros include it, in Debian you have to add it.

Vista puts you in that habit because the “Vista Menu” brings up all kinds of irrelevant crap that probably has nothing to do with what you wanted to do. XP and Vista allow the Classic Start Menu, which is better. Windows 7 doesn’t allow Classic Start Menu at all.

Mandriva has fixed the KDE menu to not act all stupid and Vista-ish, and GNOME intelligently sorts out programs using a task-based approach that is quick and intuitive.

The Windows Search in Vista and the optional Windows Search 4.0 which can be bolted onto XP are only good for sucking down CPU and RAM like they’re going out of style, and grinding the hard disk to build gigantic databases. Unfortunately some Linux distros are copycatting this, including Mandriva, with Beagle Search, but you can remove that.

I’ve just never seen the point in having a system service gladly munching on 100+ megabytes of RAM and eating a CPU core and thrashing the disk so I can get to a document half a second faster because they’ve pushed the programs menu into a horribly constructed maze. That makes Beagle on Linux even more of a $20,000 toilet seat, because GNOME works OK without it.

Given this, I doubt that Red Hat wants to spend the extra effort and money to support XFS for a few oddball customers, though the Red Hat Enterprise kernels are quite capable of loading the XFS drivers as modules, this is an unsupported state, and don’t go crying to them if something bad happens. (Also compiling a kernel yourself immediately invalidates your support contract)

Scientific Linux is probably your best bet if you’re going to be needing to use RHEL in an unsupported state since it’s pretty much just a clone of RHEL without any paid support options. (CentOS is another option but they don’t tend to respond as fast to patches and point releases).

Eric Sandeen, who did a lot of work on XFS while employed at Silicon Graphics (and still does manage a few patches now and then at his current position as file system engineer at Red hat, for the Fedora Project) also is responsible for a significant amount of work on Ext4, they both share a lot of features in common, though one or the other may clearly be preferable depending on your use case. Mr. Sandeen gave me the impression when I talked to him a while back that Fedora doesn’t trust those patches and that this is why it still relies on ext3 on /boot (even in Fedora 11). Most other distros use those patches, among them is Ubuntu (9.04 and later), Mandriva (has for quite a while, and OpenSuse (even though the installer will try to warn you away from XFS and get you to put the bootloader on a floppy disk, you can simply use xkill on the warning dialog).

The patch/hack for GRUB won’t be needed for a whole lot longer as GRUB2 will eventually start replacing GRUB, Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) development branch is using it already, and Fedora may in version 12 or 13, the rest will migrate eventually.

The plan, at least for Ubuntu Karmic, is to not disturb the original GRUB if you already have it installed and are upgrading, so you’ll either want to format and start over when Karmic is out, or install GRUB2 yourself (careful! and make backups of your important files!)

Basically this boils down to GRUB is old and stupid, its limitations may be hacked around, but no enterprise-quality distro will trust it in that configuration, GRUB2 ftw!