Depending on your distribution, keeping your system up to date can be a real chore. Installing RPMs by hand is a royal pain, what with resolving conflicts, etc. Thankfully, you don't need to do that anymore!! There is a solution, and it's called Red Carpet. Available for most distributions, Ximian GNOME is a free GNOME build that provides some excellent applications, and Red Carpet, which will notify you of updates, give you access to cool software, download and install it for you, and will even resolve most conflicts for you, which is a great bonus.