It's a weird phenomenon. Nearly every computer platform steals another one's look. Vista gets accused of trying to look too much like OS X. Linux desktops get accused of trying to look like Vista (except when they're accused of ripping off OS X). Well, okay, we guess really what that proves is that there's at least something distinctive and cutting edge about OS X's look. Love it or hate it, everyone seems to think everyone else is ultimately copying it.
There's no denying, the first time we saw OS X, our hearts beat a little faster when we saw the dock.
Until now, though, the dock concept was really sort of a nuisance to get working effectively in Linux. There is the Avant Window Navigator, and though it does the trick quite nicely, many newbies (or extremely busy people) said the tweaking factor left them wanting something a little less involved.
We've been using Cairo-Dock of late, and we really like it. The beauty of it extends far beyond the physical appearance. There are source packages, and there are Debian binary packages. Installing isn't that difficult. We even installed it, quickly and with great success, on a 64 bit system (and yes, we'll show you how.)
PuTTY is tops on the short list of applications I install first on any Windows machine. Over the years I've used PuTTY, I've installed it on a huge number of computers but I've always had one complaint; There isn't a configuration file I can backup or move to a new machine. 
