Gordon James
Circle widgets is a new extension to the GNOME shell that allows you to display widgets on the desktop that display information such as CPU usage, current RAM usage, and clock in different styles.
The extension supports GNOME scales 3.38, 3.36 and 3.34, so it should work, for example, on Ubuntu 20.10 and 20.04 / Pop!_OS 20.10 and 20.04, Fedora 33, 32 and 31 and so on.
This is ideal if you need minimalistic deskidgets, but don’t want to use Conky. Circle widgets support much (!) less customization than Conky, but they are also much easier to set up.
The following widgets are supported:
- Modern watch
- Round clock
- Ringhwatch
- Using the processor in acircuit
- Use of the RAMCircular
 |
| Circle widget settings |
Each widget is customizable. For example, the Circle Time widget can be configured to display the time in 12 or 24 hours, you can change the color of each ring, the transparency and much more. For CPU and RAM widgets, you can change the color and transparency of the widget.
Note that the Circle Widgets extension currently has a problem running on GNOME Shell vanilla, at least that was the case in my Fedora 33 test: each widget appears as gjs in GNOME Shell Dash (application changer). This didn’t happen to me with a doctor who uses Ubuntu or Manjaro.
Also worth mentioning is that when you first install this GNOME Shell extension, the widgets appear on top of each other:
Don’t worry, you can just move them – hold down the Super (Windows) key and drag them with the mouse to move them.
Installing the ring gadgets on the GNOME Shell Desktop
The install button above will take you to the widgets page of extensions.gnome.org, from where you can install the extension by clicking OFF to the right of the extension name to turn it on. Follow the GNOME Shell Browser Integration Instructions to configure the installation of GNOME Shell Extensions with your web browser if you have not already done so, or install an extension with GNOME software if it is supported.
The extension also requires the installation of some packages from the repositories of your Linux distribution. When you install an extension, a message will appear indicating which packages to install, but in some cases the list displayed by the extension is incomplete or incorrect. So here’s what you need to install (I hope I’m not running out of dependencies) for Debian / Ubuntu, Fedora or Arch Linux / Manjaro (based on the comments of the developer of this extension, except that some of the package names on this list are wrong) :
- Debian / Ubuntu / Pop!
Installation sudo apt gir1.2-gtop-2.0 gir1.2-nm-1.0 gir1.2wnck-1.0 gir1.2-clutter-1.0sudo dnf installation libgtop2 networkManager-libnm libwnck3 clutter-gtksudo pacman -S libgtop networkmanager libwnck3 clutter-Gtk
After installing these dependencies, the GNOME shell will need to be rebooted: Those using X11 can press Alt + F2, then type r and press Enter to restart them, while those using Wayland will have to disconnect and reconnect.
via Reddit (u/xenatt)
Related Tags:
gnome-shell-extension-system-monitor,linux taskbar cpu usage,linux resource monitor panel,ubuntu system stats,ubuntu 18.04 gpu monitor,ubuntu menu meter
Gordon James
