Replacing the Netspeed Widget on Kubuntu 22.04 and newer
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 theNetwork speed
preset, set theDisplay style
toText Only
and set theMinimum Time Between Updates
to1 second
. Apply the changes before proceeding to the next step. - Open the
Sensors Details
tab and in theText Only Sensors
field, search for theDownload Rate
sensor. I chose theDownload Rate (B/s)
version. There is also aDownload 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 theUpload 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.