I used to mess around with Geektool, but I couldn't be satisfied with anything I came up with, so my desktop is just empty.
I have the same issue with Rainmeter on Windows.
Yeah. I'm never a fan of what's already been designed. And I hate too much clutter. Plus there's too much information I don't really need. I see desktops with people with every single stat of the computer. Like they need to know all of it at all times. I don't need all that stuff. All I have is a small amount of information customized to look nice. Half GeekTool, half HTML/CSS/JavaScript. I'm rarely on my desktop screen though compared to the amount of time I spend in a fullscreen app so I don't need a lot of info. But BowTie has an option to keep a Bowlet on screen even in Mission Control so if I swipe up, I can see the time and date at a glance. Very convenient. (Sadly Geektool doesn't cooperate the same way and disappears in MC.)
Hehe, slightly compressed, shrunk down from 8MB PNG to <1MB JPG for purposes of showing off
In this shot the calendar, date, time and clock are all Bowtie. All coded by myself. The clock is my favorite. And the rest, the black gradient, battery, memory, cache/swap and uptime, are all GeekTool. GeekTool lets me click through to the desktop, but Bowtie does not. So the gradient is in GT instead of BT. The colon blinks and the second hand moves.
When I open iTunes, the best part happens. The calendar and date on the left slide over to the right and merge with the time and song information slides up into place. Thank you, CSS transitions. Unfortunately parts of Bowtie are broken with iTunes 11 and the developer has gone AWOL for a few years and refuses to respond. So I'll use it until the day it stops working all together.
Also it looks really nice on a Retina display.
I used to have a weather section but I used Google's XML and made a mistake one day when I set the refresh rate too high and they banned my IP to prevent overload. It might be lifted now since I have a new IP but I can't be bothered to edit the HTML back in for it. One day I'll get proper weather. But really, I don't need weather on my desktop. If I know I'm going out I just check my phone. All it's good for on my desktop is to look good. Hell, I don't even need both a clock face and digital time. It just looks good. The calendar helps though. I also don't need the memory since Mavericks changes how it's used anyway so knowing my free memory doesn't do shit for me anymore. And battery info is just for show since I have it in the menubar. I do have OCD with my cache though. So I like to keep an eye on that. But I don't need need it. Same with uptime. As for the Swap, well I don't know why I keep that. Mavericks changed how swap is made too. No longer does it fill your HDD with large files since it's compressed. Which is why it says 2.1GB used instead of 16GB+ it would be on previous versions. Basically all that stuff in the middle could be dropped in an instant. I just keep it for show.