hail the new Linux !! Linux UI has matured quite rapidly in the last few years. Dynamic content has been there for quite some time now, primarily pioneered by KDE's `karamba'. There was a time when I was obsessed with eye-candy. I got bored of it very quickly though :-) It was cool to read the headlines & weather on my desktop, but I found myself not being able to focus more on work and wasting time on just tweaking eye-candy around :-)

That said, I would like to see 2 more things being done better in Linux:

1. Good email clients: Mutt is the best one I used ... comes with a lot of customization. But the huge amount of bugs in mutt really gets to me. Mozilla / Thunderbird comes a close second. But its biggest -ve point is that it takes too much time to load. Oh yes, it can't be used without X ;-) My work environment often consists of machines which do not have X.

2. Good office tools: No OpenOffice doesn't cut it. It might be a good replacement, but not a good application by itself. Nothing even compares to the slew of features offered by MS word. Granted some of the features may not be useful or be harmless ... but just try writing out a homework with figures & tables in OO and in Word. You will soon find out the difference :-)

-Sayantan.

Yea, karamba and superkaramba look very interesting. Indeed, gdesklets is simply trying to copy them to gnome.

I'm not sure how mutt can be improved much. I use it for most of my primary work, and am in the process of switching from thunderbird to mutt completely for the same reason you mention (I want to access my mail by simply sshing to my machine).

About text editing/tables/figures etc, one word should answer your question: latex! Look at lyx, kile, and the best, vim-latex for nice editors.