I have been using the Netspeed widget on my KDE Plasma installations for a long time to display the network download and upload speed in the Plasma panel. When I upgraded to Kubuntu 22.04 a few months ago, I found that it stopped working. After doing some research, I found that the KSysGuard
package that the widget depends on has been removed from the Debian and Ubuntu repositories as it is unmaintained (Debian bug).
Thanks to a useful suggestion on Reddit, I was able to recreate the functionality of this widget using the System Monitor Sensor
widget. Here is what I did to achieve it.
- Add the
System Monitor Sensor
widget to the panel. - Right-click the widget and click on the
Configure System Monitor Sensor
option in the menu - In the
Appearance
tab, load the Network speed
preset, set the Display style
to Text Only
and set the Minimum Time Between Updates
to 1 second
. Apply the changes before proceeding to the next step. - Open the
Sensors Details
tab and in the Text Only Sensors
field, search for the Download Rate
sensor. I chose the Download Rate (B/s)
version. There is also a Download Rate (b/s)
sensor, if you prefer that. - Click on the small pencil icon edit button just after the name of the widget,
Download Rate
, to edit it. Specify the down arrow symbol, ↓, as the name. Apply the changes. - Now you have a widget that shows the current download speed on the panel, updated once every second.
- Add another
System Monitor Sensor
widget to the panel and configure it to display the Upload Rate
by following the steps above, tweaked for displaying the upload rate. - The result of doing these steps should look like what is shown in the screenshot below.
With this, I have a good replacement for the NetSpeed Widget
on my Kubuntu install.
#download-speed #kde #kde-plasma #kubuntu #netspeed-widget #plasma-panel #system-monitor #upload-speed #widget
https://www.lguruprasad.in/blog/2023/01/19/replacing-the-netspeed-widget-on-kubuntu-22-04-and-newer/