In the Linux desktop we have a very big problem: We focus very much on packages. Packages are interesting to programmers, but users care about applications.

Font Manager is a font management application for the GNOME desktop. It is not intended to be a professional-grade font management solution, but rather a simple application suitable for the needs of most desktop users and even some graphics designers who may need to manage just a few thousand font files.

Banshee is a music management and playback application for GNOME. Over the course of the year a variety of high quality, highly polished, and all around “swell” Mono GNOME Desktop applications have been popping up. As with many of these apps, Banshee has a beautiful user interface and is well architected. This article describes installing the latest version on Arch Linux and OpenSUSE 10.3

Gnome Art is an art website which allows you to download and install various items such as icons, backgrounds, desktop themes, login window theme and gtk engine. This website comes with a very interesting application which is in the Ubuntu repositories. If you want to install it, run this in a terminal:

In order to make your application appear in the Add/Remove tool (gnome-app-install), there are two steps to make: * add a “X-AppInstall-Package” line to your .desktop * and run “update-app-install” to update the database

If free software development goes by trends, then the current era might be called the Age of Extensions. In the last few years, every application from the Mozilla family to OpenOffice.org to Gedit has created frameworks in which developers can add their own small bits of functionality to an application.

Ubuntu Tweak is an application designed to config Ubuntu easier for everyone. It provides many useful desktop and system options that the default desktop environment doesn't provide. At present, it's only designed for the Ubuntu GNOME Desktop, and always follows the newest Ubuntu distribution.

Application launchers play an integral part in making the Linux desktop a more productive environment to work and play. They represent small utilities which offers the desktop user a convenient access point for application software and can make a real boost to users' efficiency.

Many articles have already been written about Ubuntu’s HUD, or Head-Up Display, a feature that is expected on future versions of the popular distribution. It is intended to replace the menu as we know it, with voice capabilities built-in. You may read the original article by Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, here.