Behold I show off my current desktop and features. I am running Manjaro Linux, a custom OS that I've been using as my daily driver for almost a year with major problems.
And I have a lovely super mario world wallpaper slightly edited from a site. You can see overall a menu and open apps in the top left, notification bar and clock in top right, and running stats (internet and CPU) on the right side.
Dragging to the right pulls out a drawer, which contains all apps on every workspace, along with general internet, memory, and CPU usage, along with the weather.
It shows an icon showing cloud cover, temperature and humidity, though it could also show wind speed, heat index, and clicking on it reveals a 5 day forecast.
We open the menu at the top right and there are my applications that I find most useful. You can see:
- LibreOffice, the free office suite.
- Qt Creator, for C++ coding.
- Audacity, for audio editing.
- OBS, for screen recording.
- Riot, decentralized secure chat service.
- LMMS, for music making.
- Exodus, cool looking wallet for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin etc.
As well as categories for the other things like games, etc. However the favorite applications are all for productivity sake.
Opening a terminal (it's what we Linux users are free to get used to) reveals my computer and OS info, as well as a custom-made tip of the day message.
As you can see the "DE" or "Desktop Environment" is called XFCE; it's my overall desktop theme -- lightweight and fast, no need for window animations or fancy effects, and you can personalize it for yourself however you want (you can even add the animations back somehow lol).
I have a day theme and a night theme, called "Dots" and "OSX-Arc", both downloadable from xfce-look.org.
I run Firefox Quantum with Vivaldi-Fox extension to color the tab bar based on the website's color theme. Also there is a day and night mode for it too.
Stay tuned, maybe I'll show off some of the apps that I really know how to use here. Feedback, questions, download links, ask away. :)