@Peter Shultz: . . . my star on Gizmodo for saying this but . . .

@Peter Shultz: Your objections would have more weight if you provided examples of better introductory subjects and useful reference material. Plus, then you would be providing something useful for the people that are interested in the topic instead of just complaining about it.

@Eriamjh: I definitely have to second this. I used to work four-day work weeks at a job that scheduled ten-hour shifts, and I absolutely loved it. Even if you can't work it out to get three consecutive days off, it still does a great job of keeping stress down.

@nsr81: Really? I never thought of it as having much of a learning curve, at least not for basic use. It was one of the first languages I learned, in fact. Books like that Beginning Perl link or O'Reilly's Learning Perl do a really good job of getting you started and able to make useful things. Plus, it's really…

Perl is a good language to pick up. Great for quick jobs, text parsing, batch work, and as a "glue" to tie together other command line tools. Still useful for web development, too, though it doesn't get as much hype as Ruby and PHP these days.

@Damián A. Esteves Mena: Hard drives are pretty well shielded and should be fine. I'd be more concerned with the exposed parts being prone to accidental dislodging and pet attacks.

Coral cache of the page, to take some load off of her ailing server: [jhische.com.nyud.net]

@Bill Burge: I have multiple monitors, I rarely maximise apps, and some of my windows are semi-transparent. I may not be able to see the entire desktop, but I see enough of it that I like having something nice there.

@TehBeardMan: Definitely. I usually just download anything I find that's 1920x1200 or higher, split them all into image pairs with imagemagick, and then see what looks good. Normally that's good enough, but sometimes I'll have to do some manual tweaking instead.

@iantendo: His stuff has been on Lifehacker before, I think. After I saw them here I used the Lemmings one as my wallpaper for a while.

@Marand: Snap of my desktop to show the cropped wallpaper. I can't remember where I got it now, the original filename was just a bunch of numbers.

Argh, every time I like a wallpaper I find it's never in a resolution high enough to be look good for me. I liked a couple of the ones Whitston uses, but 1600x1200 and smaller ends up looking terrible by the time it's cropped and scaled to 3360x1050 :|

Would I want to use it? No.

@RabidTurtl: Sadly, it's not the fault of Linux here, at least not exactly. My notebook has an Intel video chipset, and as crappy as those are, it handles multiple displays and rotation the way it's supposed to - via XRandR - and works perfectly.

@RabidTurtl: I appreciate the attempt to help, but I'm pretty sure it's just an issue with nvidia's Linux driver, which only has partial XRandR support.

Portrait orientation is one of those things I love in theory, but never seem to use in practice. I could make better use of it if I could do what I'd really like - run one display in portrait and one in landscape - but nVidia's drivers won't let me, so I have to rotate both displays.

@ChaosCon: Use the link I gave to Dnte1020, the comment system ate the first one. Sorry.

@Dnte1020: Ugh, gawker comment system cut the URL down and replaced part of it with ellipses.

@diasdiem: I've heard Linux users be compared to those guys you see who are always working on their cars, but never driving them.

@ChaosCon: If that's true, you might want to pitch in your support for CS on Linux here, if you haven't already: [getsatisfaction.com]