Linux.com: Good bits in GNOME 2.16
The GNOME Project recently released GNOME 2.16. While the latest release doesn't offer any breakthrough features, it does include a wealth of minor tweaks and improvements.
Ironically, the most intriguing improvement is the one you probably won't notice, unless you explicitly enable it. Metacity, GNOME's default window manager, now features several 3-D extensions to its composite engine. These extensions allow you to add some eye candy to your desktop by enabling window effects and different types of transparency. This feature is not enabled by default, though, and you have to compile Metacity with the --enable-compositor option to get it to work. For the time being, the new compositing effects can only be used with a handful of graphics cards.