Conky doesn't start during login after last update

I noticed two (somewhat minor) issues post reboot after applying the update:

  1. Conky did not load at start. I have a few apps set to launch at boot, and they all loaded except conky. Manual conky launch afterwards worked 100%. I typed conky as a filter in KSystemLog, but found no entries recorded to aid troubleshooting.
  2. After all the apps loaded, I moved them around to my preferred locations (dual-monitor) and noticed Steam had a white trail/shadow that was following it… almost like a mouse trail, but off the side/bottom of the Steam UI window. I re-launched Steam and it seemed fine… but in between I also noticed the Some app stopped the compositor message and pressed ALT-SHIFT-F12 as per the notification to restart it. Might the compositor being stopped caused the weird white “trail”, and if so, why just the Steam UI window? Is there another way to check the compositor status without relying on notifications?

Other than this, the upgrade has been great. I also decided to finally try the 5.14.10 kernel after the update (moving from 5.13.19); which thankfully seemed to being some game performance improvements (ESO via Steam/Proton) so far.

Conky may fail to start if something monitored by conky is not available

File ~/.config/autostart/conky.desktop can be edited to add a pause before conky starts

change this line - Exec=/usr/bin/conky
to - Exec=/usr/bin/conky --pause=3
to add a 3 second pause before conky is started
(pause may need to be increased for older systems booting from HDD instaed of SSD)

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Can you confirm / deny a sleep in starting Conky solves the issue? (I’ve had a sleep 3 since day 1 in my Conky startup)

:crossed_fingers:

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Thank You for the reply @nikgnomic … this got me thinking, what if the system was still “processing the updates” after the first reboot?

I figured out that the “halted compositor” was responsible for the weird Steam trails… I can replicate/resolve the drag-trail behaviour at will by cycling through Alt-Shift-F12 to start/stop the compositor… and I get the white trails every time the compositor is stopped.

So I’m thinking whatever background update process(es) halted the compositor after the update reboot, likely influenced conky too.

I’ve rebooted a handful of times now since, and all is behaving normally… Conky, compositor, and Steam are all starting up successfully like they were before. I’ll definitely keep your pause steps in mind for the future.

Lesson learned for me… treat the first post-update reboot as an “update finalization step”, note any issues, and reboot at least once more to see if any issues repeat or resolve.

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