I have recently discovered a couple of awesome developments which are worth mentioning:

• The Awesome X Window Manager is an active light-weight tiling window manager based on dwm. Similar to wmii or ion but seemingly more advanced and very easy to use. Version 2 is available from Debian and Ubuntu repositories so you can simply apt-get install awesome ... now isn't that awesome?
• Google has released an official version of Google Gadgets for Linux. It's still early in development but the code is open source (Under the terms of the Apache License v2.0)... They don't offer pre-packaged binaries, however, it looks reasonably easy to build it. Once I have a few minutes to play I will definitely be talking about the experience. This is especially exciting for me because it's similar to the WidgetRunner project that I dabbled with over a year ago. The documentation mentions XULRunner and Spidermonkey as dependencies so it seems like it's based on the Mozilla platform and that is awesome!