I've been playing with some cool stuff that's in Ubuntu: acl's and kio-slaves
ACLs are Access Control Lists, they can give finer control over access to your files than the normal permissions allow.
KIO-slaves are KDE-specific, but can still be useful to GNOME users
at times. In particular there are some extra packages buried in the
ubuntu repositories.
Read on for more Ubuntu goodness
*note* the packages mentioned might not be available for hoary, or
they might require that the universe/multiverse repositories are
enabled. I'm using breezy preview with universe/multiverse