Windows customization has been a thing ever since I bought my first laptop. I installed Windows 7 on it, and if you are from that era, you can understand that the OS's appearance wasn't stellar. 14 years later, Windows 11 looks much better than its predecessors, but not to the extent I want. For the sake of customization, I can change the background and accent color, and that's it. Microsoft scrapped individual widgets and brought the widgets board, which is just a fancy pop-up dashboard. Even the default themes are bland, which prompted me to bring back the trusty old rain meter.

Most Windows themes are just glorified wallpaper packs that don't do anything beyond that. Rainmeter is the exact opposite, as it offers endless customization options. It's so deep and granular that you might be overwhelmed with the choice in front of you. Let's discuss my experience of using Rainmeter to build a custom desktop.

Picking Rainmeter over theme packs

It's on a different level

Customizing the desktop is more than wallpaper carousels and accent colors. A traditional theme available on the Microsoft Store looks great, but it only tweaks these two elements and leaves out everything else. What if I want to change the included elements? What about adding widgets that display the system information or pull data from the web?

Windows widgets are already in a sad state, and Rainmeter can solve all of these problems. Rainmeter uses a different concept of skins that contain all these elements (some might focus on a select few), with more customization than you get with any other tool.

The initial setup of Rainmeter isn't as troubling as you might expect. It's a straightforward install, and you don't need to do anything special, disable security features, or change system policies to get it working. I also haven't encountered any problems with Windows updates. I previously used Explorer Patcher, but it stopped working after a Windows update. It took quite a while before developers could get it back working.

Building the best version of my desktop

Abundant options

Rainmeter isn't like any other theme pack or customization utility with a limited set of options. You'll easily find multiple website hosting skins that you can directly install and apply to your PC. This abundance of options is a bit confusing, as you end up scrolling through a lot of options to find the “best” thing.

After installation, Rainmeter’s default skin was pretty much sufficient for viewing most of the data, which included system stats, weather, disks, and more. However, the default skin looks severely outdated, and I couldn’t stick with it for long.

The best thing about Rainmeter is its ability to let you use multiple skins at once. This feature is extremely important because you can pick any element from any skin and then build a beautiful desktop layout with it. Unlike a theme, you can mix and match desktop elements (widgets) and place them carefully across the screen.

For my setup, I used elements from three skins. The first one is Irene, which was an impulsive download, but I didn’t like all the elements. The Recycle Bin and Date widget stood out the most, so I used both of them on one side of the desktop.

Next, I needed some hardware stats, so I added the SysDash skin, which has every possible resource stats widget you might need. It has CPU, GPU, network, drives, and more options, but I used the network, temperature, and CPU widgets. The weather widget was also cool, so I placed it next to Irene's date widget.

My right-hand side of the desktop was ready at this point with all the data I needed, but the left felt pretty empty. To fill it, I stumbled upon another stat-driven skin named Syntage. It was almost similar to SysDash, but had a vertical dock with it. However, it’s not the macOS dock that every skin tries to include. Syntage populates the social websites and a few Windows directories.

I can directly access my social sites, Reddit, browser, and File Explorer with it. The dock eliminates my need for the Taskbar, so I hid it using the Taskbar settings page. I also added a music playback widget below the dock to fill the empty space. The last piece of the puzzle was a good, dark wallpaper, and I used the Microsoft Store for it. It’s the wallpaper from “Dark and Light theme by Nick Boyer” and looks great on my system.

Since all the widgets are light-colored, the stark, dark background makes them pop out. Likewise, you must also pick a wallpaper that complements the widget's color. Don’t mix light and dark-colored widgets; otherwise, they’ll be illegible.

Control and customizations

Rainmeter doesn’t hold back

Adding elements to the desktop is merely the starting point. Rainmeter lets you individually tweak the position, transparency, hover actions, loading order, and more for each skin element. Honestly speaking, the drag-and-drop support works fine, and you can reposition elements without going into the settings. The transparency effect is useful if you want to blend the appearance with the background.

Rainmeter has a dedicated game mode that unloads all skin layouts when you open a game or a demanding app. There are several other settings that you can fiddle with, but I mostly keep using these, and the system tray icon to load or unload some skin elements. My current layout doesn’t devour memory and stays under the 100 MB mark most of the time. It’s a nice thing because I don’t want to sacrifice performance to keep my desktop appealing.

Legacy customization tool

Rainmeter is still relevant today due to its huge community, and finding new skins is never a problem. There are paid skins available on some websites, but if you are into custom layouts, you can mix and match several elements as I did. Rainmeter is completely free, and the level of control you get with it is difficult to find elsewhere.