Linux Desktop Widgets

Welcome to Linux Desktop Widgets, This repository is a community-driven collection of beautiful and functional desktop widgets built with Conky to bring your Linux desktop to life.

Our goal is to create a gallery of modern, useful, and easy-to-use themes that anyone can enjoy.

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Features

• Modern UI Designs: Clean, professional themes inspired by modern operating systems.
• Highly Customizable: Each theme is a self-contained folder, making it easy to modify and personalize.
• Movable Widgets: We include a special script that lets you temporarily "unlock" your widgets to drag and drop them anywhere on the screen, then "lock" them back into your desktop background.

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Getting Started (Installation)

To use these widgets, you first need to install Conky and a few recommended tools on your system. This guide is for Ubuntu/Debian-based systems.

1. Install Conky

The conky-all package includes extra features used in many of our themes.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install conky-all

2. (Recommended) Install a Compositor for the "Glass Effect"

To get beautiful transparency and blur effects, you need a compositor like Picom.

sudo apt install picom

Before running a theme that uses it, you'll need to run:

picom &

3. (Recommended) Install a Nerd Font

Many themes use icons and special characters. We recommend installing a Nerd Font like Fira Code.

sudo apt install fonts-firacode

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How to Use a Theme

Running a Theme

Each theme is in its own folder inside the /themes directory. To run a theme, use the -c flag with the conky command and point it to the theme's configuration file.

For example, to run the Modern Cards UI theme:

conky -c themes/modern-cards-ui/theme.conkyrc

To stop all running Conky widgets, use the command:

killall conky

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How to Move and Reposition Widgets

Our project includes a special utility script to make your widgets movable!

First, run the toggle-conky-mode.sh script to switch to Move Mode.
A title bar will appear on your widget.

./toggle-conky-mode.sh

Drag the widget to its new position using the title bar.

Run the script again to Lock the widget. The title bar will disappear, and the widget will be baked into your desktop in its new location.

./toggle-conky-mode.sh

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How to Contribute

We'd love for you to design and share your own unique Conky theme!

1. Fork this repository.
2. Create a new folder for your theme inside the /themes directory (e.g., themes/my-cool-theme).
3. Copy the contents of the /TEMPLATE directory into your new folder.
4. Modify the theme.conkyrc file with your unique design.
5. Update the README.md inside your theme folder with a description and a screenshot of your theme.
6. Submit a Pull Request with your amazing creation!

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Our Theme Gallery

Here are the themes created by our community:

• Modern Cards UI
  A clean, professional, multi-card layout for system monitoring.

(More themes will be added here as they are contributed!)

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toggle-conky-mode.sh

#!/bin/bash

# The path to your Conky configuration file.
# IMPORTANT: This script is designed to work with ONE theme at a time.
# Change this path to the theme you want to control.
CONFIG_FILE="themes/modern-cards-ui/theme.conkyrc"

# First, stop any currently running Conky instance
killall conky
sleep 1

# Check if the config file exists
if [ ! -f "$CONFIG_FILE" ]; then
    echo "Error: Config file not found at $CONFIG_FILE"
    exit 1
fi

# Check if the config is currently in 'desktop' (locked) mode
if grep -q "own_window_type = 'desktop'" "$CONFIG_FILE"; then
    # SWITCHING TO MOVE MODE
    echo "Switching to Move Mode... A title bar will appear."
    # Change window type to 'normal'
    sed -i "s/own_window_type = 'desktop'/own_window_type = 'normal'/" "$CONFIG_FILE"
    # REMOVE 'undecorated' to show the title bar
    sed -i "s/undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager/skip_taskbar,skip_pager/" "$CONFIG_FILE"
else
    # SWITCHING TO LOCK MODE
    echo "Locking widget in place... The title bar will disappear."
    # Change window type back to 'desktop'
    sed -i "s/own_window_type = 'normal'/own_window_type = 'desktop'/" "$CONFIG_FILE"
    # ADD 'undecorated' back to hide the title bar
    sed -i "s/skip_taskbar,skip_pager/undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager/" "$CONFIG_FILE"
fi

# Start Conky again with the modified configuration
conky -c "$CONFIG_FILE" &

echo "Done."