Aesthetics, Optimizing Your Desktop
One of the Nicests conky Setups I Have Ever Seen
February 18th, 2009 | 4 Comments
I love me some Conky–that super versatile, text-based system monitor that can be extended to display just about any information you want, right on your desktop. I came across this screenshot from a featured desktop at Lifehacker, and man, I just love it. Clean, useful, and very pleasing to eye.
The contributor Conky setup uses several custom scripts to pull in Twitter info, the weather, as well a todo list. Custom fonts make the date/time look great and really give a sense of polish to this unique heads-up display.
click for bigger image
Hit the link for full-sized screenies and details on how to get something similar running on your own Linux desktop.
- To-Dos, Weather, and Twitter on a Linux Desktop @ Lifehacker
Dude this is such an old idea. KDE 3 has Super Karamba for a few years already and KDE 4 has Plasma for this.
Anyway I find this stuff useless for me, as I simply never have my desktop visible. I use all the screen for applications. I only see my desktop after startup and before shutdown :)
Anyway if someone would extends this desktop information idea to notify about new events in the same manner as IM software notifies about friends coming online or new chats. This would be useful for users like me :)
You’re right, widget or monitors on the desktop is nothing new, but I always love to a see tasteful, a useful, and non-resource-hungry implementation.
You make another good point as well…most of these sort of things are really only useful if you have a hi-res screen…I always messed around with Conky and the others, but never really used it as much as I would have liked. Now that I have 22” monitor, Conky is a lot more useful to me.
Regarding notifications, you might interested in this post from Mark Shuttleworth’s blog on how they might be integrated in to future versions of GNOME/Ubuntu: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/253
You know, it’s funny–I rarely have my desktop exposed either, but I LOVE having my current conky up on it b/c it’s all info I like to be able to glance at, but rarely monitor regularly. Like Nathan, I like conky rather than svg-style widgets b/c it’s mostly just text, so it’s REALLY light.
Also, the idea of having twitter on the desktop is really cool. and so is that chalkboard font.
Conky ROCKS!!!!!!
KDE sucks big time.. when I look at it… I get a headache…
conky it not like wigjets or gadjets or screenlets…
It’s a very different idea.