Beginner’s Guide to Install and Use Conky in any Linux distro

A desktop background showing various system stats such as CPU details, hard drive details, a time clock and date, a short calendar excerpt, etc.

Conky is a lightweight system monitor available on Linux and BSD. It can display the system information and statistics such as CPU consumption, disk usage, RAM utilization, network speed, etc. in an elegant way. All the information is displayed on top of your wallpaper. It gives your desktop a live wallpaper feel.

The looks of the displayed information can be changed via Conky configuration file.

Conky is incredibly configurable, and I have it setup on my Manjaro Linux desktop to monitor available drive space, fan speeds, etc. I did a video a while back comparing various system monitoring tools, including Conky, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5XaY_gt5VU.

It is a bit of work to set up a more complex setup, but once done, you don’t really need to touch it again.

See a good beginners guide at the linked article below. Although it is aimed at Ubuntu users, Conky really works across all distros.

See https://itsfoss.com/conky-gui-ubuntu-1304

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