[qbasic_forever]

I remember this kind of purely for fun desktop stuff was all over Windows 3.1 and 95. There'd be shareware apps with no purpose other than making bullet holes appear randomly on your screen, or snow flakes fall everywhere. It was wacky and fun vs. the all serious business that operating systems have become today.

[userbinator]

Also interesting is the fact that such software was perfectly capable of rendering those effects with decent performance on hardware of the time --- single core CPUs with a few hundred MHz, barely anything resembling a GPU, and memory usage in the low MBs if not kilobytes. Now even the completely bland and boring, mostly borderless UI of an IM application is ridiculously sluggish on a high-end multicore machine with a "gamer"-class GPU and takes insane amounts of RAM.

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

I had the MST3K "creeping error" program that put the guys on screen like when they were watching a movie. They'd randomly make a comment or move. It was pretty fun,and totally useless.

[trelane]

xroach says hello. https://software.opensuse.org/package/xroach

Oh! And XSnow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xsnow