A good and free alternative to all these would be “Samurize”. Samurize is a free software which allows you to
display custom text on screen. But there’s more to it than just displaying text. You can use Samurize to create a killer desktop which otherwise, can be attained only by the use of widgets. But how far and how well you can go is all about your power of imagination. This is what I could end up with.

To keep things simple, I have used minimal colours as you can see – only shades of black and blue. Samurize lets you add custom widget like meters to your desktop, in either graphical or textual manner.

You can create your custom metres from add meter drop down in the right panel. You can change the display type to pie chart, graph, and progress bar etc under Draw Type.
You are also allowed to drag and move your widget in the design area. Options to merge two configuration files are also available.
My customized desktop includes these components:

The custom clock

This clock shows the time in hours, minutes and seconds.
The current time is read as 21:45 hours. It is a bit uncommon but flashy and interesting. The rounded rectangle at the back adds to the effect. The outer ring gives the hour, next to that minutes and the innermost is the second.

Launchy

Launchy is a free application launcher developed by a graduation student. You can get it at the official Launchy site.

Custom image viewer

This is my custom image viewer. I copied the source from a .sam file and edited it a bit to scale down the size basically. This wallpaper changes automatically and needs a plugin.

The process display

This is another multi display area with all processes using more than 10 MB of memory listed out. I have also set up an uptime, ram memory, laptop battery and date-time display in textual format.

To top it all, I have used a theme slanXP with a compact taskbar and a Bart Simpson wallpaper with the green Bart re-colored to blue with gimp. So this is all about my desktop, totally created with free softwares. You can give it a try as well…
The configuration file, the wallpaper and plugins for the desktop above can be found here.
Download Samurize here.
Download launchy here.