What is a gadget? The first definition that appears is 'a device or control that is very useful for a particular job'. A more common understanding of a gadget is a pretty graphic staying on your desktop and displaying system information, weather or anything else...
Gadgets are available not only for graphical desktop environments. There are gadgets for web applications such as WordPress for example.
Still in this article I'll make a review of Google gadgets running on Linux. I have bought a new Lenovo last month and since then I have left my old LXDE in favour of the good old Gnome. Of course, this change has had to come with lots more graphical extras 
So my next move was to install some gadgets and I can't even remember how I stumbled upon Google gadgets. The very first thing I liked is the big analogue clock. The most useful gadget is the one for checking Gmail. Here is how my Desktop looks like now:
