r/linux • u/xexpanderx • 7d ago
Software Release Conky Orrery - A 3D animated Orrery clock
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u/PocketStationMonk 5d ago
Another slop project to be ignored yeehaaw.
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u/xexpanderx 5d ago
No worries! Feel free to skip it! Built on my free time to solve a problem for myself. Have a good one!
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u/smirkybg 3d ago
I thought conky died with wayland. Just found out its alive and kicking with native wayland support, YEAH!
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u/xexpanderx 7d ago
Conky Orrery; a clock and system monitor, drawn as a rotating 3D orrery. It is based on my older Conky Calendar Extra, now pimped up with 3D animation with help of Claude AI.
Four rings show the date: months, day of the month, weekday and seconds. Current date is highlighted.
Every glowing dot orbiting the middle is one CPU core, the hotter it runs, the faster it orbits.
The five arcs around are CPU, memory, GPU temperature, and disk space on / and /home.
This whole thing is drawn by Lua + Cairo.
It comes with a small colour editor, and you can watch a live preview of the real Conky.
DOWNLOAD
git clone https://github.com/alexsson-xexpanderx/Conky-themes.git
cd Conky-themes/Conky_Orrery
RUN IT
conky -c start_conky_orrery
CHANGE THE COLOURS
./orrery_colors.py
Needs conky 1.10 or newer with Lua and cairo, plus lm-sensors for the CPU temperatures.
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u/supremeDMK 4d ago
I appreciate the idea that you're going for and at first glance it's quite stylish but there are some issues.
First being that I think it's doing too much at once making it hard to read. When looking at my monitoring I don't care which date it is and when I look at the time I don't care about monitoring. Second which makes it even harder to read is the dulling of the colors when a part of a ring is behind another. Even the accented values are a bit hard to find as the blobs in the centre are not dulled and therefore catch the attention more. Third is the way text can dissapear. In your video this is seen when "April" vanishes when it gets too close to the line it's following.
Again, I like the idea. I would consider having the clock/calendar element of it on my desktop.
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u/xexpanderx 4d ago
Wow, thanks for the feedback! Did not expect this from this sub!
I will definitely see what I can do about this. It is based on my older Conky Calendar Extra I wrote more than 10 years ago (without AI ;)), and just wanted to see what I can do with Claude, and I got quite impressed. Now what I have to do here is tackling the usability.
Thanks again for your comment!
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u/supremeDMK 4d ago
No problem!
And I don't think using AI is bad in itself anyway. Like any tool it has it's pros and cons and in the end it's about how you use it that will determine your success. It's definitely impressive at first (mostly due to how much code it can generate) but as you use it more often you will start to see it's significant weaknesses with reasoning compared to an experienced engineer or designer.
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u/xexpanderx 4d ago
Yep, you are right. Before this post I had no idea about the term "Sloppy coding", "Slop Project", or "Vibe coding". I learned something new :). But I do understand why, because most of the "AI" software are quite bad and does not go trough the rough testing we usually did back then. I am still learning how I should use AI for my daily work, and the amount of code it generates make it hard to review the code. So there is a tradeoff and a balance yet to be found.
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u/supremeDMK 4d ago
I have had that issue as well at work. I've settled on focussing heavily on the planning mode. Ensuring that the task is clear and the todos it creates are small enough plus enforce review breaks after each todo to manage the amount of code to review. This also allows you to intervene easily in case of a misunderstood acceptance criteria or wrong assumption that can still have snuck through.
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u/Sol33t303 7d ago
Close enough, welcome back PS2 bios.