Imagine a situation when you have a lot of applications and windows open and you have to constantly switch different windows. This takes away the focus from your work and kills your precious time. What if we could arrange all the windows folders and running applications in tabs just as we open multiple websites in Firefox?

Perhaps Mac users know this better than anyone else.  Shortcut keys do exactly what they say, give you shortcuts, saving you time. On my previous computer, my “C” key had worn off the keyboard because I spent so much time copying with “Ctrl-C” rather than going to the menu each time to select “copy”. Whether you are starting an application or cycling through virtual desktops, Linux users tend to love shortcut keys just as much.

In KDE, shortcut keys are customizable for each and every application, and you can also customize global shortcuts that affect the desktop, window manager, command interface, and other features. What follows is a brief guide to using KDE shortcuts, but first I am going to press “Ctrl-S” to save my work.

Since the release of KDE4, a major overhaul of the KDE desktop, there’s been some grumbling among the Gnome community about if and when Gnome would have a major overhaul. Well with Gnome 3 we’ll have it in the form of Gnome Shell. It pretty much replaces the panel and window manager in a normal Gnome installation with a fully composited environment with some great new functionality.

One of the most innovative and simultaneously controversial features of KDE 4 is the Plasma widget, Folderview. Simply put, it allows a user to display the contents of a file system folder within a widget on the desktop.

Beyond just displaying files on your computer, Folderview can be used to launch applications, display remote file systems, filter large folders for particular types of files, or serve as a traditional desktop.

I love placing all the shortcut icons and files on my Desktop because it allows me to access to my data quickly and save me the trouble of searching for it in Nautilus.

On the other hand, I also have a passion for clean desktop. I have a huge collection of beautiful wallpapers and I love to set my desktop to rotate the wallpaper every 30 minutes. It is my source of inspiration and seeing the beautiful wallpaper allows me to relax whenever I am too stress out from my work.

Apparently, having a lot of desktop shortcuts and a clean beautiful desktop together is not quite possible. I need a solution, a method that allows me to clean up my Desktop, yet allows me to access to my shortcut icons and files quickly.

Navigating the desktop trying to find the correct shortcut icons to launch an application can sometime be a chores, if you have a overcrowded desktop filled with plenty of icons. With Fences, you can now organize your desktop into a more manageable manner and even hide your icons when you have no use for them.

If you’ve never used Window Maker on your Linux desktop, you’re missing out. I’ve dabbled in nearly every window manager/desktop environment out there, and while all have their pros and cons, I always go back to Window Maker.

It’s elegant, functional, flexible, and FAST!  For those who like screenshots, this link is a Google Image search for Window Maker.

Window Maker was originally developed as a clone of the NeXTstep desktop, an ancestor of OSX.  NeXTstep was considered one of the most productive and innovative desktop environments of its time, and Window Maker has extended this legacy to modern hardware and software platforms.

Enough with the history, let’s get down to business.  For starters, you’ll want to get Window Maker installed.  Depending on your choice of Linux distribution, these first few steps can vary somewhat.  For the sake of this article, I’ll assume you’re running Ubuntu or another Debian derivative.