You might find this helpful. Let's you set any gif, video, or webpage as your wallpaper. Source: over 2 years ago

I always wanted more feedback, so that even in the mechanical disks and lots of fans era my desktop has always shown more data with GKrellM plus some of its plugins, namely multiping to show the status of my NAS and router, and bubblefishymon for a funny but very effective and immediate way to show that system load is growing suspiciously before fans start screaming. http://gkrellm.srcbox.net/ As for servers,... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago

Possibly not old enough to be included in that list, but my oldest piece of desktop software I always run on my main machine is GKrellm with BubbleFishyMon as system load monitor. http://gkrellm.srcbox.net/. - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago

That doesn't always give correct readings depending on the chipset on your MB. There was a driver missing for like IT87 that returned voltage and temps to psensor. I finally gave up trying. gkrellm can monitor cpu, and many other things. You can add what you want. Source: almost 2 years ago

Gkrellm was not really part of GNOME or KDE, but it was one of the best tools and there was recently talk about porting it to modern GTK releases. Source: about 2 years ago

OP: Another option is GKrellM. It has not been updated in a couple of years, but it still appears in Software Manager. It should work with the current versions of LM. I used it for a while on LM 17.2 because I wanted a desktop system monitor and I was too lazy to mess with Conky - I stopped using it when I moved to LM 18.1 and eliminated eye candy. Http://gkrellm.srcbox.net/. Source: over 2 years ago