Download speed

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.