However, Conky 1.10 is extremely buggy and has made incompatible changes to it's config syntax since the 1.9 release.
The changes from conky 1.9->1.10 made for an incompatible disaster and conky is now totally borked in the current Ubuntu 16.04 repos. Bugs have been reported... but, while maintainers and devs figure out issues, I need my old conky back!
So I just reverted to the old `conky-std` 1.9.0 in Ubuntu 16.04, and I'm back in business for now.
Here is how I did it:
First, let's see which conky version is in installed on my 16.04 (Xenial) machine:
$ conky -v | head -n 1 | cut -d" " -f 2
1.10.1
so, I removed this borked conky and purged it's configurations and leftover dependencies:
$ sudo apt-get remove --purge conky-std && sudo apt-get autoremove
I wanted conky version 1.9, which is not in the Ubuntu Xenial repos. So I snagged the package that shipped with Trusty:
$ wget http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/c/conky/conky-std_1.9.0-4_amd64.deb
once I had the .deb package downloaded, I installed it with `gdebi` rather `dpkg` so it would also install the necessary dependencies:
$ sudo gdebi conky-std_1.9.0-4_amd64.deb
we should now be back in business. Let's check the version that is installed:
$ conky -v | head -n 1 | cut -d" " -f 2
1.9.0
score!
One final task is pin the package at the 1.9.0 version so future package updates don't revert us back up to the bad version:
$ sudo apt-mark hold conky-std
done!
I'm back running conky 1.9 like a boss for now. I hope the upstream situation gets sorted soon.
TLDR:
$ sudo apt-get remove --purge conky-std && sudo apt-get autoremove
$ wget http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/c/conky/conky-std_1.9.0-4_amd64.deb
$ sudo gdebi conky-std_1.9.0-4_amd64.deb
$ sudo apt-mark hold conky-std
happy hacking.
