Customisation
Do they help ease admin access?
Systemrescuecd doesn’t offer much in terms of a customised interface. The distro has a simple boot option that takes you to its Xfce desktop, which doesn’t offer any conveniences or customised interfaces to help orientate new and inexperienced users.
The Morpheusarch project does produce an ncurses-based script called Lindiag to assist with common system admin and recovery tasks. You can use it to check services, diagnose the network, manage packages and recover data from drives. However, the script oddly isn’t included in the distro by default, and you’ll have to clone it from Github.
ALT Linux Rescue also doesn’t offer much in terms of customisation. One of the few aids it does have is the forensicmode boot option that brings up the distro without activating the swap or mounting any partition. There are also a couple of scripts that automatically mount attached disks and fix any issues with the master boot record, which is rather convenient.
In contrast, AIO System Rescue Toolkit has a bunch of CLI tools, but to make for easier access it has a shortcut on the desktop for all of them. Besides the Live environment, you can also boot the distro’s CD/USB inside Windows to access all its Windows-specific repair and rescue tools via a custom interface.
What helps UBCD standout from its competition is its custom boot menu. The distro ships with no graphical desktop and instead boots to a very well laid-out menu. The customised textbased menus help guide you to the relevant utility for your issue. The menu is logically arranged and individual entries have useful information to help identify them.