Do you use a conky - Y or N and Why?

[imschmeg]

I'm beginning to think that I ditched conky too quickly. It's extremely efficient - using only about 0.2% of a single CPU (measured as user+system tics / total runtime) on my lowly 8yo Dell laptop when only conky internal monitors are used (no fast-updating execs). I've been doing some performance testing of other options for monitors, such as the monitor plugins in Xfce's panel or tint2's executors - and they're about 4x-5x as CPU costly as conky, probably because of the process spawning & switching involved. It's just that having a panel for interaction AND a conky for monitoring seems wasteful of screen resource and overly demanding on my own attention resource.

[imschmeg]

On closer inspection: conky and any other measuring tool, when measuring certain sensor-based things (clock speed, fan speed, temps), has a very different performance profile - at least on my old Dell N7110 laptop. When running systemd (but not otherwise), the performance hit from reading sensors is shown in the cpu tick data, and it is very high: conky takes about 80X more CPU (16% vs. 0.2%) when sensor data is shown vs. when only non sensor data (cpu %, load, disk and net speeds) is shown. Regardless of the kernel, and regardless of what is used to read the sensors (conky or just doing 'watch sensors'), there's a disruptive UI pause each time the sensors are read. If I move the mouse in circles, for a few tenths of a second it pauses just before conky or watch sensors updates. Also, sound playback gets a click at that time.

[oops]

... Conky is a very usefull app, and conkytoggle.sh is the way I use for it (to switch off/on).

[rc racer]

Yes, mainly to check CPU usage, hard disk space, and memory. I also like a big bold clock with the date of the month on it

[KoO]

Windows users I fired up my old G62 lappy. And forgot all about two conky alternative I used back in the day.
Desktop info https://www.glenn.delahoy.com/desktopinfo/
and this one
https://github.com/ArcadeRenegade/SidebarDiagnostics

[freebird54]

Definitely Y.
I monitor a few things
- (temps, usage)
- system updates (on the arch and arcolinux distros)
- network (seeing that the VPN is still hooked up, and usage)
- hard drives usage and temp
- a handy calendar
- weather reporting and forecast (8 days)
- air quality monitoring
- music player album art and song info
- time zone display for the people I most connect to all over the world.

Nothing else does all that with such a low CPU hit. Here's a look at its current configuration (frequently changing) - although NOT including many others with such things as foreign weather info, tides at the beach destination - even moon phases should I need them.

https://i.imgur.com/3jQeckN.jpg

I happen to be on Arch for this post, but the same often runs on MX as well, along with compiz!
freebird54



Mod note: image changed to link, please mind the forum rules on remote linked image sizes.

OOPS! Must have clicked the wrong link at Imgur (I put it there to AVOID large uploads here!) couldn't tell it was sending it here (not slow like it was on 300 baud and saving to a floppy!) Anyway, mods - sorry about that - no embedded tags then...
freebird54

[Z0rg]

- Y
But since I switch between two different windows manager : I can't resist the Conky appeal on any XFCE desktop I got my hands on ! But I don't really know why I never use it with i3wm. Perhaps 'cause I made my terminals transparent in i3 and I don't like to see things moving behind... Personal aesthetics I guess.

Conky is a amazing great tool in regard to the power consumed for what it offers.

[woodyb12]

Yes I o. For monitoring system resource usage.

[Bonzoo2525]

N/ unneeded gameboy nonsense

[jdhedden]

I started using Conky when I came to MX Linux. Didn't use it previously I suppose because I didn't see one I liked. I forked an existing Conky for my own purposes.

My-Conky.jpg

conky.txt