Good evening.
I was reading Beautify your Zorin Pro/Core 16/17 and figured i would give Conky Manager a go. But ever since i installed it there has been nothing but issues. Or well, one issue in particular I haven't been able to resolve.
Here are some screenshots from the different widgets i currently have, only the first one is a template i downloaded from Pling.
Alsafi/Alsafi.conf
TeejeeTech/CPU Panel
Green Apple Desktop/Gotham
Its like the frames are just rendered on top of each other.
Has anyone ran into this before?
When you launch Conky Manager, you can click on one of your conky's in the list. Then click the Text Editor icon at the very top (Between the settings icon and the Open parent folder icon).
In that file, check that the following matches yours - change yours if needed:
own_window yes
own_window_type normal
own_window_transparent yes
Every file has those properties, and most of them has the same values as well. But conky still acts crazy weird.
EDIT: Here's some code from the Gotham widget:
own_window yes
own_window_type normal
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
own_window_colour 000000
own_window_argb_visual no
own_window_argb_value 0
All of that looks normal. How about graphics?
sudo lshw -C video
I left a widget running for quite some time now and it has rendered so many times that i can't even tell what it says.
kriss@Zorin-Desktop:~$ sudo lshw -C video
*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: GA106 [GeForce RTX 3060 Lite Hash Rate]
vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
version: a1
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=nvidia latency=0
resources: iomemory:400-3ff iomemory:400-3ff irq:185 memory:82000000-82ffffff memory:4000000000-400fffffff memory:4010000000-4011ffffff ioport:4000(size=128) memory:c0000-dffff
*-graphics
product: EFI VGA
physical id: 3
logical name: /dev/fb0
capabilities: fb
configuration: depth=32 resolution=1920,1080
Pretty much the same card as me.
And your driver?
nvidia-smi
kriss@Zorin-Desktop:~$ nvidia-smi
Sun Apr 21 21:06:56 2024
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 545.29.06 Driver Version: 545.29.06 CUDA Version: 12.3 |
|-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+======================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Off | 00000000:01:00.0 On | N/A |
| 33% 52C P0 51W / 170W | 1685MiB / 12288MiB | 34% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=======================================================================================|
| 0 N/A N/A 1501 G /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg 302MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 1652 G /usr/bin/gnome-shell 195MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 5004 G ...yOnDemand --variations-seed-version 44MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 5727 G ...97,262144 --variations-seed-version 209MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 6799 G ...bian-installation/ubuntu12_32/steam 2MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 7269 G ./steamwebhelper 3MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 18539 G /usr/bin/java 908MiB |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Interesting... the 545 is fine. I am using 550.
Are you connected using HDMI or DP or VGA?
Are you logged into the desktop on Xorg or Wayland?
Are you connected using HDMI or DP or VGA?
I'm using DisplayPort on both monitors.
Are you logged into the desktop on Xorg or Wayland?
Says X11 for me, so it must be Xorg. I'm not too familiar with that, although i have seen some threads about wayland. Anything worth switching to?
Wow.
I am on DP on both of my monitors, using an RTX 3060 and on Xorg, as well.
I use quite a few Conky objects, actually.
Maybe this is a Gnome Desktop thing. You might try some other parameters:
own_window_type override
own_window_type desktop
own_window_transparent no
own_window no
It may take some trial and error and some mix and match...
That helped, i kinda got it working. Although, it is a bit of a struggle to have to do this. Aren't there any other (better) alternatives to desktop widgets?
we're in 2024 for gods sake
But atleast now it renders properly and values aren't being displayed ontop of each other.
It seems to me... that desktop widgets are being discouraged at a higher level.
Without stronger demand and encouragement, there are not better alternatives because Desktop widgets are seen as "not Modern".
It is an attitude, not a reality.
Conky is singularly one of the most useful pieces of software in computing. It provides a very malleable Head Up Display that can monitor and report critical system actions in real time.
That it is 2024 has more to do with why there is a lack of support.
What you are experiencing in this small moment is one of those eye opening events that make it clear to the End User who really matters. It ain't us End Users.
To me... I would not consider this solved. You have a solid black background behind your conky.
Playing with the conky configuration file with parameters is tedious and not-fun, but it may be the only viable route toward getting what you want. I have spent hours doing it, refining it.
One other thing (That just popped into my head) is Compositing. It is much easier to check this on Zorin OS Lite since the XFCE4-Window Manager Tweaks included application has a checkbox for Compositing right there in plain sight.
However, Gnome integrates its desktop instead of being modular, which is odd and exclusive to Gnome. I am not sure how to handle compositing on Gnome or if it is even possible.
But enabling compositing is necessary for display transparencies.
In the old days, Gnome users used Compiz for this. On the new Gnome Desktop, Compiz is much harder to implement but there may be some Gnome Extensions that can be installed to help with that.
I am sorry - this is not a very upbeat and cheerful post supplying neat solutions.
Thank you for trying anyway. Atleast i got the answer i was looking for.
I don't mind working with config files, and fiddling around with them. But the fact that I just have to try some values without knowing exactly what to set makes me just want to wait until there is some proper support for desktop widgets.
If someone could just tell me to set this value to that, that value to that and that was it - then i would definitely go for that.
What i did instead was to install btop, that way i can keep on overview of the system resources within the terminal. For anyone coming across this post at a later time and would like to try btop:
sudo apt install btop
