Stephen Gentle

You get to use it, instead of it using you. A Linux system immediately snaps to attention and does your bidding, with no hassle at all. Even when you tell it to do something impossible, it tries to make you happy and only reports back to you upon failure. If you’re tired of the computer popping up an “Are you sure?” dialog box in your face, you’ll love Linux. Stop and think about it: when the computer makes you tell it everything three and four times before you’ve convinced it that what you’re trying to do is a good idea, isn’t the computer really just arguing with you???

It trusts you. Never enter a serial number or an authentication code again! Because the software’s free in the first place, it isn’t full of booby traps to keep anybody from stealing it. Tired of feeling like a cop is watching you over your shoulder with every mouse click? A Linux system takes it for gospel that it is your computer to do whatever you please, and leaves the police work to the police.

You can have any kind of desktop you want! Go for a familiar interface with KDE, Gnome, and Xfce. Or get Enlightenment and gaze in awe at just how cool it looks. Or go for a performance desktop with a minimalist Blackbox or IceWM. Rid yourself of mouse-dependency with RatPoison, or be ‘leet with the Spartan TWM. Get a flexible desktop designed to emulate almost anything with FVWM or go for the cutting edge of graphics capabilities with XGL. With over 50 window managers and desktop environments to choose from, there’s a Linux experience that’s just right for you.

If you liked tabbed browsing in Firefox, you’ll love virtual desktops. Have you ever gotten tired of maximizing one window, doing something, minimizing it, and hunting for the button on the taskbar to bring the next window up? In Linux, you open a program on desktop one, maximize it, and hit a key to go to desktop two and keep another program maximized there, and so on – as many desktops as you want. Never settle for anything less than full screen. And as if that weren’t enough, you can also hit another key combo to bring up the console – your desktops are still there, undisturbed – while you can flick back and forth between multiple consoles as well.

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