Improvements in Gnome 2.20 include: Support for right-to-left languages; desktop search integrated into the file chooser dialog; new features in the Evolution email and calendar client; browsing of image collections; simplified system preferences; and improved power management.

Gnome's image viewer features an improved image collection interface and the Nautilus file manager can now display a disk usage pie chart in the file system properties dialogue.

Tracker indexing services has been added to the Gnome file dialogue.

Evolution too has got several new add-ons, including an "attachment warning" dialogue that warns users when they send emails without attachments if they have used the word `attachment’ (or similar words) in the email.

Evolution comes with a new mail icon in the panel notification area and the much-needed backup/restore email feature for migrating emails from one machine to another, or for recovering from those hard disk crashes.

Gnome 2.20 also claims significant improvements to power management. The Gnome Power Manager tracks power consumption over time in order to provide more accurate estimates of remaining power.

Evince, the Gnome document viewer, has also received performance improvements. It now comes with support for interactive PDF form editing. An improved codec management system in Totem, Gnome's video player, allows individual Linux distributions to add custom mechanisms for automatic codec installation.

The note-taking application has support for network note synchronization. The GEdit text-editing programme includes support for syntax highlighting colour schemes and newly-added syntax highlighting support for several additional scripting languages.

The Gnome configuration utilities have also seen a few changes.