Lively Wallpaper turns video, web pages, GIFs, shaders and even small game builds into a desktop background, pauses itself when a full screen app runs, and handles each monitor separately. GPLv3, no paid tier.

TaskbarX slides the taskbar icons to the middle of the screen with a smooth animation, adds transparent, blurred or acrylic backgrounds, and offers 42 animation styles with per-monitor settings. Portable and free, no installation and nothing written to the registry. Version 1.7.8, still the usual pick on Windows 10, though newer Windows 11 builds may block the centring.

WinDynamicDesktop changes the wallpaper according to local sunrise and sunset rather than a fixed timer. Open source and free, with a handful of official themes and hundreds more made by the community.

Rainmeter 4.5.26 is a free open source desktop customiser under the GNU GPL, laying skins on the desktop that range from hardware usage meters to full audio visualisers, on Windows 7 and later.

An open-source hardware monitoring panel under two megabytes that sits in the taskbar or floats on the desktop, showing processor, graphics, memory, disk and network load with three-level threshold colours. Portable, MIT licence, no advertising.

A free and open-source tool for rebuilding what a Windows desktop displays, with tens of thousands of community panels covering hardware monitoring, weather, music visualisation and task lists. Maintained since 2001.

An open source successor to a long-running classic menu project, restoring a start menu with three layouts, skins and deep customisation, plus a toolbar for the file explorer. Free under a permissive licence, and it uninstalls cleanly.

A free Windows utility that bundles scheduled shutdowns and reminders, sticky notes that live on the desktop, an animated desktop pet, video wallpaper, a floating launcher and a countdown timer into one small program instead of seven.

A free tool from Microsoft that swaps the desktop background once a day with a photograph curated for the search engine's front page. It runs silently in the background, keeps a few days of history to browse back through, and does nothing else.

A cartoon cat that sits above whatever you are working on and answers every keystroke. BongoCat turns keyboard and mouse input into movement, expressions and even melody, with appearance and sensitivity you can tune. It is free, open source, and runs on Windows, macOS, Linux and in a browser tab.