I think you're over-estimating people's squeamishness. Speaking as someone who was taught how to skin, gut and otherwise prepare a rabbit for eating recently it's astonishing how quickly it goes from "clearly a rabbit" to "clearly meat".

Sure. If you don't know what to do, it's definitely slower. The trick is chaining commands together. ls can order its output by filesize (ascending or descending), head will then get you the n largest files: "ls -S | head -n 12" for twelve.

Actually thinking about it, the easiest way to move those files whould then be to use xargs: "ls -S | head -n 12 | xargs -I% mv % /target/dir/". Oh, and "df -h" will show you the free disk space for all mounted partitions under Linux.

This is all besides the point, though. You're essentially arguing that your shell isn't powerful or obvious enough, and you're right, but using a GUI isn't a fix - like another poster said, it might make the easy things a bit easier but it makes the hard things a lot harder.

What? Of course Unix systems support RAID, both hardware and software. There are also filesystems that can do exactly what you want with non-identical drives, such as (IIRC) ZFS.

I'd find it a lot easier to approach the file-size knapsack problem from a bash prompt with ls, head, mv and maybe cut, but if you want to spend your time clicking around, that's fine by me. All of those utilities are available for windows, by the way.

Close, but no, the blame lies with the media who persistently presented what was in fact a dissenting view in the face of increasing amounts of evidence that suggested otherwise. I refer you to someone brighter than myself who is known for writing on the subject.