Working with Windows
If you have not already done so, start an application using the Application Starter, like Find Files.

A window! What now?
Well, usually people work inside windows, but sometimes you may want to manipulate windows. Here's a quick overview of some of the most common window related functions:
Move a window 	 Drag the window's title bar, or hold the key down and drag anywhere in the window.
Resize a window: 	 Drag the window's border, or hold the key down and drag with the anywhere in the window.
Maximize a window 	 Click the maximize button in the title bar (in the default decoration it is the square, next to the X) to make the window fill the screen, or if the window is already maximized, to shrink it back to its original size. Clicking with the maximizes the window vertically, and with the , horizontally.
Iconify a window 	 Click the iconify button in the title bar (next to Maximize) to hide the window. Restore it by clicking on the window's icon in the taskbar.
Switch between windows 	 Aside from the usual mouse click to switch to another window, you can use Tab to switch windows. See below for more techniques.

Title bar buttons
windows have some pretty standard buttons on their title bars which give you fast access to some common operations. The default button layout looks like this:

On the left side:
A menu button. This usually shows a mini icon for the application. Click on it to get a window operations menu. Shortcut: F3 opens the window menu.
A sticky button, with a picture of a tack. What the heck is this? Stay tuned!

On the right side:
An iconify button.
A maximize button.
A close button. This closes the window. Shortcut: F4.

Switching between windows
Now that we know how to deal with windows, we encourage you to open some other windows using the panel, since we will now discuss how to switch between different windows. Since this is such a common activity, offers several ways to do it; pick your favorite!
Many window systems require you to click the mouse in another window to begin using it. This is 's default behavior, termed Click To Focus focus policy. But you can also configure your desktop in a way that moving the mouse pointer on to a window will activate it. This is called Focus Follows Mouse. If you select this policy using the Control Center, the window under the mouse pointer is always the active one. It doesn't necessarily come to the front automatically, but you can still click on to the title bar or the border of a window or, a special, you can use the key and click the anywhere on the window to raise it.
Here are some other methods to switch windows:
Pick a window from the window list menu. To open the menu, click the on an empty area of the desktop, or click the icon with several windows on the panel, or finally click the up arrow at the left hand end of the taskbar in the panel.
Hold down the key and press Tab to cycle through the windows.
Use the taskbar (see below).

Using the Taskbar
The taskbar displays a list of small icons, one for each window on the desktop. In the default setup the taskbar is located inside the panel, but it can also be located at the top or the bottom of the screen.
The taskbar is very powerful. In the default configuration, if you have more than one window from the same application open, they will be grouped, so that you see one icon per application in the taskbar.
A simple click on the taskbar button will pop up a list of the open windows for that application and you can choose the window you want to use. Choosing one of these entries with the left will bring you to the selected window immediately. Click on a taskbar entry with the right and you will see a menu allowing you to operate on all the windows grouped under that icon, or each window individually.
You can choose to see all the windows on all the desktops in your taskbar, no matter which desktop you are currently viewing, or to only see the icons for the desktop you are looking at. You can also choose to ungroup the icons, so that each open window will have it's own icon in the taskbar. These and many more options are available simply by right clicking on the taskbar handle (the small textured bar at the left hand side) and choosing Preferences.
The icons on the taskbar resize themselves to make room for applications, so you can fit many more applications than you might think. Making the panel wider, will let the taskbar icons take on a row and column layout, but they will still resize to fit more icons.

Using Virtual Desktops
Now, what was that sticky thing?
It may happen that you have more windows open than space on your desktop. In this case you have three possibilities:
Leave all windows open (cluttered desktop)
Iconify those windows which you do not need at present and use the taskbar or Tab to switch between them (still a bit confusing and much work!)
Recommended: Do what a real operating system does if there is not enough physical memory: Use virtual memory, in this case virtual desktops.
The third option is the way to go! can handle several different desktops, each with its own windows. The default configuration provides four desktops. You can switch between the virtual desktops easily with a click on one of the desktop buttons on the panel. Also F1...F4 will send you to the corresponding desktop immediately, or Tab will cycle through the desktops.
Virtual desktops are very nice. But sometimes you want a window to be present on every desktop. This could be, for example, a small chat window, an alarm clock or whatever. In this case you can use the above mentioned sticky button which will pin the window on the background so that it will appear on every virtual desktop.
The sticky button can also be used to move a window from one virtual desktop to another one: push the sticky pin on the window, switch to a different desktop, and release the pin by pushing it again. You can achieve the same result by using the context pop-up menu of the window's entry in the taskbar (menu item To Current Desktop) or the To Desktop option on the window operations menu.