No, it's graphics. The transparent background is replaced by some colorful image -- I see the part of the KDE logo in blue. The bars and numbers do not disappear after they are written to the screen, so it very quickly builds up every write on top of each other. In the terminal, while it is running there is an error message
** (nvidia-settings:11526): WARNING **: Error retrieving accessibility bus address: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.a11y.Bus was not provided by any .service files
/dev/sdc: open: Permission denied
/dev/sdd: open: Permission denied
/dev/sda: open: Permission denied
conky.sh: 6: conky.sh: end: not found
don@Hibiscus:~$
** (nvidia-settings:11550): WARNING **: Error retrieving accessibility bus address: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.a11y.Bus was not provided by any .service files
** (nvidia-settings:11565): WARNING **: Error retrieving accessibility bus address: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.a11y.Bus was not provided by any .service files
** (nvidia-settings:11580): WARNING **: Error retrieving accessibility bus address: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.a11y.Bus was not provided by any .service files
.
.
.
My hard drives that you see in the error message are all fine and mounted. Maybe it is a regression to
this.
EDIT: Yes, that was one part of the trouble. Those /dev/sdx permission errors are gone after I did:
# chmod u+s /usr/sbin/hddtemp
But the graphics are still borked.
EDIT: I removed and reinstalled the nvidia-driver and nvidia-kernel-dkms packages, and the module was rebuilt and after a reboot conky runs perfect. So something went wonky with the nvidia driver, I guess.