Linux Applications Are Amazingly Flexible

Linux shines in the area of software flexibility. You are not locked into one way of doing things, the authors of most programs give you a great deal of choice over how things look, feel, and function.

For example, Linux does not present one GUI style. It can be very surprising to someone coming from the Windows world to see just how much variety Linux has in this area. Building on the X Window system's flexibility, there are dozens of different GUI styles. Ranging from the minimal fvwm, to fvwm95 (a Windows lookalike), to Afterstep (a NextStep lookalike), to Enlightenment, Gnome, and KDE, which look like nothing else in the world.

Even if you pick a particular "window manager", as these GUI styles are called, you still have plenty of room to maneuver. The following links (warning: lots of graphics) illustrate what Gnome can look like:

Here is a website devoted to making and distributing theme files for X Windows. And here's a page that shows how flexible KDE is.