>Golden age of desktop customization

Laughs from FVWM, GKRellm and so on. Or WindowMaker, Fluxbox and more with a dockapp slit 'tray' (or compatible tool).

Later KDE4-6 got a similar stack. but I remember Gnome2 having GDesklets.

Still, when in Unix can customize a keybinding to anything, (and with wmctrl spawn any window on top from their title), these gadgets are useless. When you can open, for instance, some messaging tool with the win+i keybinding, on top of everything and close it with win+q, suddenly these tiny tools don't matter anymore.

Ditto with the weather, opened windows, some shell with RSS feed (sfed for instance) which would spawn as fast as any widget ever.