Searching this forum leads me to suspect that not many ArchLabbers use Conky OR no ArchLabbers had any hassles wrt the breakage that happened a few months ago. I offer this in hope that it might somehow assist some future readers.
Disclaimer: I claim no credit at all for this – all the smarts belong to others, whose clever work i have simply purloined.
My short-term workaround of several months had been to downgrade lua
back to 5.3.5 … with that step all my Conky configs remained fine & dandy, thus all their Conkies still work. Like Nixers globally, the lua update initially broke all my Conkies.
However by definition holding an important package back indefinitely is unviable & hazardous, for a rolling distro. Yesterday i invested the hours necessary to research the problem, test the solution in my Arch VM, then deploy it for real in my Arch SSD. Shortly i hope to also deploy it in my other Archie VMs including both ArchLabs ones.
This breakage applied to Nixers who run the “traditional” Conky, & to those like me who use Conky-Manager
for convenience.
Important References:
- Anyone else's conky break with today's update? - Applications - EndeavourOS
- Conky Manager - Newbie - EndeavourOS
- Conky not loading anymore · Issue #992 · brndnmtthws/conky · GitHub
- Kernel 5.7.12 - conky and conky-git not working anymore · Issue #991 · brndnmtthws/conky · GitHub
- AUR (en) - conky-manager2-git
- Arch Linux - conky-manager 2.4-4 (x86_64)
- AUR (en) - conky-manager2-git
- AUR (en) - conky-cairo-no-nvidia
- AUR (en) - conky-cairo
Steps:
- Remove the hold on
lua
in/etc/pacman.conf
, ie, editIgnorePkg = lua
back toIgnorePkg =
. - Re-upgrade
lua
from 5.3.5-3 → 5.4.0-2. - Uninstall Arch Community repo’s
Conky-Manager
2.4-4. - Install AUR packages
conky-cairo-no-nvidia
[atm 1.11.5-2] [or use the nvidia alternative if necessary] &conky-manager2-git
[atm 2.7-2]. If they need to remove existing Community repo variants, let them. - Download script conky/convert.lua at main · brndnmtthws/conky · GitHub, make it executable [
chmod +x convert.lua
], then run it against your configs. Usage:convert.lua old_conkyrc [new_conkyrc]
. - Launch
conky-manager2
, start each of the converted Conkies. - Enjoy.