Conky is a light-weight system monitor for X. It supports all kinds of metrics – anything from CPU, memory and network, to emails, music players, and more.
It reminds me of the old days, before Gnome and KDE took over the desktop environments – I think everybody had something similar running as part of the screen background.
The installation on Fedora is trivial – conky is packaged and available with a simple “yum install conky“. The configuration, on the other hand, is not so much. GitHub repository provides quite a few fancy user configurations, but there was a change in configuration file format in the version 1.10, and things aren’t as smooth as I would like.
It’ll take a bit of playing around, but I’m sure I’ll eventually lose enough sleep over this to just give up and have something semi-decent on my screen.