I have been using OS X for a few months now and still am unable to understand the reasoning behind the OS X dashboard. To access the widgets you have to hide all other processes. This defeats the purpose in my eyes of having a tool to monitor your system or anything else for that matter.
Having used Linux for many years I got used to GKrellM. This is the end all tool for monitoring your computer or just about anything else you want to do with it. In my eyes it is the tool that the Windows Vista developers looked at to base their sidebar off of. There may have been a few other sources, but GKrellM is the best tool around and better in my opinion, than Vista Sidebar.
One of the issues I have with the dashboard is the fact that most of the widgets I find I want to be active all of the time. Natively they are only shown in a special location where the dashboard takes over the entire screen. I find this outright annoying. It could be due to the fact that I am a true multitasker; at a minimum I have four different things going at the same time. To hide all of these things while I look for one simple widget is just annoying and not worth the hassle.
While writing this I did find the ability to show the widgets on the normal desktop at hackzine. This is a much better way to use widgets. I have not tested this method as of this moment, but it seems to be a much better way of using this ability.
I am not quite sure why someone would want to use widgets when there are much better tools out there such as GKrellM.
