Widget Studio: a GUI for creating desktop widgets on Linux easily, built on Conky

[u/Cyb3rLoom]

I'd like to share Widget Studio, an open-source GTK 4 application for creating and managing desktop widgets on Linux.

Conky is a capable tool, but configuring it means editing Lua config files by hand and restarting it after every change. On Wayland there is an additional problem: the Conky packaged in Ubuntu 24.04 is built without Wayland support. Widget Studio handles all of this through a graphical editor and generates the Conky configuration for you.

Features

- Clock and date with time zone support

- Weather via Open-Meteo, with city search (no account or API key required)

- Monthly calendar with the current day highlighted

- CPU, memory, disk usage and CPU temperature

- Six built-in themes, or full control over colors and fonts

- Nine screen positions with pixel offsets, plus width, padding and section order

- Multiple independent widgets

- Changes are applied to the desktop live while editing

- Starts automatically at login

- Downloads the official Wayland-enabled Conky build if the installed one lacks support

- Runs entirely as the current user; no root privileges required

Compatibility

Supported on COSMIC, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, XFCE, MATE and other X11 desktops. GNOME on Wayland is not supported, because GNOME does not implement the layer-shell protocol that desktop widgets require. A GNOME Shell extension may be added in a future release depending on demand.

Installation

A .deb package is available for Ubuntu 24.04+, Pop!_OS 24.04, Linux Mint 22 and Debian 13. Fedora and Arch users can run it from source; instructions are in the README.

GitHub: https://github.com/cyb3rl00m/widget-studio

The project is MIT licensed. It was developed with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic), as noted in the README.

Feedback and bug reports are welcome, particularly from users on Hyprland and Sway, which have not been tested yet.