Once upon a time there was something similar for MS Windows, but it was a long time ago and not so beautiful, besides under Windows. Now there is such a thing for Ubuntu that I was extremely pleased. This program displays on your desktop a map of the World (very similar to pictures from space) and sunlight, which is currently illuminating a part of the planet. In essence, this is
Quirky Wallpaper with a very user-friendly GUI.
There are four types of expanded cards. I liked the first one the most:

')
It is also possible to see the planet in the form of hemispheres:

And even watch the phases of the moon (the image is square, you need to make the desktop background black)

And the last utility - the ability to autorun.
Images are taken
from here and updated at regular intervals.
While I was taking screenshots, I was told the most pleasant news - I had a repository for Ubuntu of this desktop decoration. Now for installation it is not necessary to collect it from source codes. For installation:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:realtime.sunlight.wallpaper/rsw
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install sunlight
Thanks for attention.
UPD.: The speed of the system has almost no effect. It may slightly affect the speed of "tyrnet" at the time of loading a new image.
UPD2 .: I completely forgot. Based on
these three articles .