Bernardo Kuri, New media designer, programmer, ... (more) New media designer, programmer, die hard Linux user.

I completely agree with James, although I would like to add a couple of points:

1) What you're apparently seeing as a weakness is indeed quite the opposite. In the world of Linux, the more diversity the better. For example, there's nothing stopping you from using Calligra and LibreOffice at the same time.

2) There are more than two "Linux worlds", which are actually called desktop environments. They may be the bigger ones for sure, but there's certainly a lot more variety out there. I encourage you to give other DEs a try to see if any of the options fit you better.

Try giving Duckduckgo a try. It is a good way to not only "un-personalize" your results from Google, but also to join results from Bing and Yahoo (and probably other search engines as well). Although I agree with Max that straight google tends to be better at finding exactly what I want on the first try.

Off the top of my head, I can think of at least a couple of ways to accomplish what you want. The most generic (read: language-agnostic) way I can think of to move the mouse pointer involves CLI apps such as xwarppointer[1] or xpointer[2]. Another way would be to use a programming language such as python (which has amazing integration with opencv[3][4]) coupled with the pymouse[5] library.

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References:
[1] xwarppointer: Moving the X cursor
[2] xpointer (command line tool)
[3] pyopencv - Python bindings for OpenCV
[4] OpenCV Wiki
[5] PyMouse

Take a look at both crond and atd. The former is used for recurring tasks and the latter for one-shot task execution in the future.

A simple cron example:

$ crontab -e
@hourly notify-send "Another hour has gone by"

A simple atd example:

$ at now +5 minutes
notify-send "5 minutes have passed"