[ Thanks to Matthew Casperson for this
link. ]
“Opera has introduced the ability to run standalone
widgets with version 10.60. This article will show you how you can
use Opera to replace applications like desklets and gdesklets.“Since version 4, KDE has had support for a technology called
Plasma, which essentially creates the whole desktop out of
individual widgets, with many more third party plasmoids (which are
essentially widgets) available. A quick search of the internet will
pull up some interesting and useful plasmoids.“Gnome on the other hand doesn’t really include any native
support for desktop widgets, making desktop widgets are a very hit
an miss affair. Third party applications, like gdesklets and
screenlets, can be hard to install, and tend not to be actively
maintained any more”