XWidget Alternatives
XWidget is described as 'free desktop customization platform. It’s light, handy with powerful visual widget editor and very subtle animations. The Android page is found here: http://android.xwidget' and is a desktop customization tool in the os & utilities category. There are more than 10 alternatives to XWidget for Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD and Wayland. The best alternative is Rainmeter, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like XWidget are Conky, MenuMeters for El Capitan, GKrellM and Desktop Info.
XWidget alternatives are mainly System Information Utilities but may also be Desktop Customization Tools or Network Monitors. Filter by these if you want a narrower list of alternatives or looking for a specific functionality of XWidget.
Rainmeter allows you to display customizable skins on your desktop, from hardware usage meters to fully functional audio visualizers. You are only limited by your imagination and creativity.
Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any kind of information on your desktop. Originally a fork of Torsmo, Conkys torsmo-based code is BSD licensed. New code in Conky has been licensed under the GPL 3.0.
GKrellM is a single process stack of system monitors which supports applying themes to match its appearance to your window manager, Gtk, or any other theme.
This little application displays system information on your desktop in a similar way to some other desktop information tools. Unlike others, this application looks like wallpaper but stays resident in memory and continues to update the display in real time.
- Free Personal • Proprietary
- Windows
Lets you keep your eye on system resource usages of your PC. It supports 43 kinds of information including CPU, Memory, Network, and detailed HDD usages, so you may discover what's limiting your system performance in each occasion.
GeekTool is an application for Mac OS 10.6+. It lets you display various kinds of information on your desktop via 3 default plug-ins:
Discontinued
The program is reportedly still working, but latest version, 3.3.1, was released in October 2016. It can be still downloaded from the official website.
- Free • Open Source
- Linux
- Wayland
This program is a GTK3-based wrapper to display a script output, or a text file content on the desktop in sway or other wlroots-based compositors. It uses the gtk-layer-shell library to place the window on the bottom layer.
MiniUsage displays various data like CPU usage, amount of network flow, battery status and process names which uses much CPU time in a menubar. It takes little space and can display various data, so it's suitable for notebook.
Discontinued
The program seems to be no longer updated. Last version, 3.0.0, released in April 2015, can be still downloaded from the official website, but it doesn’t work on macOS 10.13
Plasma Workspaces is the umbrella term for all graphical environments provided by KDE. Plasma separates components into "data engines" and their visualization counterparts.
Discontinued
The term "KDE Plasma Workspaces" is no longer in use anywhere with the release of KDE Plasma 5 in 2014. It has been broken up into multiple components; the important ones are already in the AlternativeTo database (e.g. KDE Plasma).
