I am a Windows/Linux user, who is learning Mac OS X out of interest in doing dev-work for the iPad which I recently purchased. However, OS X is driving me nuts by trying to protect all it's system files, hiding all of the important OS components I want to tweak, and generally making it impossible to do any modification to the OS in general to make it more usable.

Therefore, is there a way to turn off all the idiot-checking in Finder?

On XP, I can disable "Hide Protected Operating system files" and set "Show Hidden Files".
On linux, there really aren't many hidden files, and changing the configuration for .files is easy enough in Gnome and XFCE.

How can I set up OS X in a similar way.

I am not new to computers, and I am fully aware that deleting system files can damage or even irreparably disable a OS install. Therefore, If I intentionally try to delete a file, or move something, it's probably intentional, and I am willing to accept the consequences in any case.

At this point, I have fallen back to doing everything through the command line (which takes forever), because Finder is practically unusable.

(As for what I am attempting to do, I also asked about GUI changes here.)