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Reader chaebi69’s heavenly desktop combines a well chosen wallpaper with a few common tweaking tools to create a beautiful, ethereal workspace. More »

Over at Maximum PC, I (Adam) have written up a guide to customizing your Windows desktop, complete with my favorite tools for tweaking and streamlining Windows. Lifehacker readers are no strangers to desktop customization, so let’s hear more about your favorite customization tools in the comments.

If you’ve considered dual booting Windows 7 with XP or Vista but all you really want is some Windows 7 eye candy, reader Dato’ Fazly’s Windows 7-like XP desktop might be right up your alley.  The desktop consists of the Vistart skin (from deviantART), then employs a tutorial from AskVG for installing a custom SevenVG Refresh Theme. At the time of this writing, the AskVG link was broken, so you may want to try the Google Cache version if you’re not having any luck.

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deviantART crafter giannisgx89 offers up an unofficial Vista (SP1) theme that puts Windows 7’s basic look and feel on your desktop in a lightweight, non-intrusive way. Take a closer look below.

Like any unofficial theme, using the Windows 7 PDC Style theme will require unlocking your copy of Vista to allow unofficial themes, which we covered in our guide to using custom Windows visual styles. More »

Canonical, the parent company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux system, wants to implement a new (and vaguely Mac-ish) method of user notification in Ubuntu’s next release.

You can check out a demonstration of the new notifications in action at Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth’s blog post. As noted by Ars, the goal is to provide a more user-friendly experience for anyone jumping onto Linux, and give the desktop’s pings and blips a uniform look and feel, as opposed to the multitude of notification apps and tools that use the free D-Bus protocol in a variety of ways. More »