GNOME includes a variety of software applications, from complex applications such as personal information managers, spreadsheets and word processors, to simple applications such as address books, diversions, and multimedia utilities.

This part of GNOME is of most interest to us. The application framework includes the libraries, documentation, and utilities that you'll use to build graphically rich applications that rely on features of the GNOME environment. Some of the GNOME libraries include Gnorba, a wrapper around CORBA; GTK+, a widget set and event-driven GUI application development kit; and GLIB, a library that includes support for data structures such as hashes and linked lists.

GNOME session management helps applications remember what state they were in when you log out. The next time you log in, the applications restores the desktop and applications. Web browsers can remember what document you were browsing, and your word processor can open the document you were editing and position the insertion point where you left off.

The GNOME file manager resembles file managers found in other operating systems (such as the Macintosh Finder and Windows Explorer). It not only lets you browse files on your computer, but supports a variety of other file systems (including tar files and FTP sites). It also supports a document-centric user interface model by launching the corresponding application when you double-click on a document.