While these widgets are close to your desktop, they’re not actually on your desktop: For that, you need a third-party tool called Widget Launcher.

Checking the weather is easy in Windows 8.1 thanks to the live tiles, but for desktop-only types there are also several ways to have weather at-a-glance.

To make this really useful and display it on your desktop, you can add the following as a shell script in GeekTool, replacing the YOURCITYCODE text with the actual code from Yahoo's weather feed.