The correct attitude.

You guys have a monitor?

8 hours? I would kill to get 8 hours battery life.

Like others said, you can try installing Arch manually (not with the install script). You get the hang of the terminal and you get to see a bit more of how Linux works under the hood. The wiki is your friend, spend some time reading it!

Julia Evans recently did a thing about job control here. Nothing yet on multiplexers though