How to customize your Windows 11 and 10 desktop

Start with the wallpaper: it sets the colors for everything else.

• Built in: Settings, Personalization, Background. A picture, a slideshow or a solid color, and on two monitors right-click the picture and choose Set for monitor.
• In Vealo: a gallery by category, your own images and videos, separate wallpaper for each monitor, the Glass and Mono glass filters with grain, and mirroring. All free.
• Windows can't do live wallpaper on its own. How to set a video and keep it out of the way of your games: video wallpaper guide.

Dark mode is in Settings, Personalization, Colors, under Choose your mode. In detail, with switching by time of day: Windows dark theme.

• The built-in dark theme is never fully black (AMOLED): windows and the taskbar stay dark gray.
• Vealo has 10 free ready-made themes, and the darkest are Black · Teal and Carbon. Pure black #000 is built in your own theme (the Custom button), and the theme from wallpaper colors picks them straight from the image (both in Pro).
• Complete dark desktops: dark setups in the Workshop.

The taskbar stands out more than anything else, and the standard gray one clashes with any look.

1. Built-in color: Settings, Personalization, Colors, pick an accent color and turn on Show accent color on Start and taskbar. It only works in Windows dark mode.
2. Built-in transparency: the Transparency effects toggle on the same page.
3. In Vealo, the Taskbar row in the Themes tab: Dark or Light for free, Theme colour in Pro. With the Match system style toggle, the Glass style keeps Windows transparency on, and Mono turns it off for an exact color.

You can't see the wallpaper behind the shortcuts. In Windows you can hide icons with a right-click on the desktop, View, Show desktop icons, but then you can't get to your files. Vealo hides the icons in a panel that opens with a click on an empty spot of the desktop.

All the ways to tidy up: clean desktop.

Windows widgets live in a separate side panel. There are none on the desktop itself.

• Vealo has seven widgets right on the wallpaper: clock, player, music visualizer, system load, calendar, weather and notes.
• Each one has its own styles, materials, color and size, and the color can follow the theme.
• More on each one: desktop widgets.

Windows only lets you change the size and color of the arrow. A different shape means a cursor pack: 20 ready-made ones in Vealo, or your own.

Step by step, with examples of every pack: cursors for Windows.

The last layer, the one that brings the desktop to life. Windows has nothing like it built in.

• Particles. Rain (free), snow, leaves, embers and lightning under the icons.
• Parallax. The wallpaper gains depth and follows the mouse, on video too. It needs a clean desktop: with icons shown, the layer would cover them.
• Glitch and VHS. Tearing stripes, grain, color fringing and jittery lines, like an old tape. Per screen, at 30 or 60 frames.
• Lighting. Keyboard and mouse in the theme color via Razer Chroma and OpenRGB; Screen mode mirrors the colors on your monitor.

More on lighting: RGB guide.

Once your desktop is ready, save the whole thing. A setup stores everything from this article at once and applies in one click, and you can grab ready-made setups from other people in the Workshop.

How it works: desktop setups. Don't feel like building it yourself? The Roulette tab puts together a new look from wallpaper, theme, effects, widgets, cursor and lighting in one spin.