One of the Mac's features is Automator, a tool that allows you to record user actions to make often repeated tasks automated. This is one of the features that is often ignored but proves to be very powerful.
In Linux, there is now a tool that gives us with the same feature and it is called GNU Xnee. It is "a suite of programs that can record, replay and distribute user actions under the X11 environment."
I have yet to test this but it seems very promising. Now, if only there is a way to do this outside of X11. :)
Image from Flickr:elsie.