It is really amazing that in many ways than one, it is the open source software developers who are in the forefront of innovation the most. If you ask me, one reason may be because they listen to the end users more than any proprietary software developers. Secondly, the open source programmers are not tied down by the bureaucratic hurdles that weigh down on their closed source counterparts. But in my opinion, the most pertinent reason is that creating open source software is purely a labour of love - a love of coding and creating something of real value to themselves and to others.
Take Nautilus file manager for instance, it has a plethora of hooks built in which allow a user to navigate to different locations by just typing in a name. For example, to get network locations, you type in network:/// in the location bar of nautilus.
There are a number of such shortcuts which allow an end user to navigate to different locations with ease. Shankar has compiled a set of nautilus shortcuts which throw light on the in-built versatility of Nautilus.
