Ubuntu has a powerful raft of power management features, accessible through System > Preferences > Power Management, but you might notice one missing if you're used to Windows or OS X: hard disk spin down time.
Programmers will be pleased to hear that Gedit includes syntax highlighting. However, it doesn't appear until the document is saved. It can be enhanced by clicking Edit > Preferences and checking Highlight Matching Bracket which, as its name suggests, will highlight the opening
and closing brackets of any command/phrase.
Thunar is the default file manager used in the stripped-back Xfce4 desktop of Xubuntu. It starts quickly, has a low-memory footprint, yet is very powerful and provides all the features you're likely to need. In fact, it beats Nautilus in many departments when it comes to features.
If you find yourself sometimes accidentally hitting the Caps Lock key, this tip will be a God-send. Just open a terminal and type xmodmap -e "clear Lock" to disable it. On my system the keyboard LED for the key still lit when it was hit, but there was no other effect within Ubuntu.
Whenever you mistype a password Ubuntu will pause for two seconds before letting you try again. This is for a good reason, because hackers often try brute force techniques to guess the password.
The rm command doesn't have a trash facility. Once files are deleted, they're gone forever. However, you can create your own trash command which, when used at the prompt, will move files and/or folders to Ubuntu’s standard trash folder.
Gedit shouldn't really be used for printing stuff out. That kind of thing is better handled by OpenOffice.org. But if you occasionally run off a quick block of text, or look at hard copy of some code, you'll havenoticed that Gedit always prints in Monospace font, even if you've set the screen font to something else in Edit → Preferences.
If you dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows on your computer the boot menu appears for 10 seconds, during which you can select either Windows or Ubuntu. If you only have Ubuntu installed, a prompt appears for three seconds telling you that you can hit a key to see the boot menu.