My main grievance against GNOME 3 and Unity is the elimination of all except a few applets. Both grudgingly allow some basic applets, such as a clock, but each lacks the ecosystem of applets that made GNOME so configurable. You only have to look at the rich assortment of applets in KDE -- which calls them widgets -- to see what GNOME and Unity are missing. If anything, KDE's widgets are even richer than GNOME 2's applets, with dozens of small pieces of functionality that range from the serious to the trivial and the basic to the expert and obscure, including everything from hardware indicators and system configuration tools to desktop enhancements and toys and educational software.