Want to display the real-time network speed in your system panel? It’s easy to accomplish it in Ubuntu with the default Gnome Desktop.
Gnome users can use extensions to customize the desktop interface and its parts, such as window management and application launching. And here’s an extension to display the network speed.
Supported Systems:
This tutorial works on all current Ubuntu releases, including Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.04, and Ubuntu 21.10. As well, Fedora, Manjaro, Debian, and all other Linux distros running Gnome Desktop are supported.
Net speed Simplified extension:
The extension works on most recent Gnome shell versions, including Gnome 40, Gnome 3.38, Gnome 3.36. With it, you can display network speed in panel in different modes: Total net speed in bits or Bytes, Up and down speed in bits or Bytes, and total of downloaded in Bytes.
You can change the indicator appearance easily via mouse click:
- left click to change mode,
- right-click to toggle total data usage visibility,
- and middle click to change font size.
More configurations, including position on panel, refresh time, limit unit, font color, and more, are available in the Extensions utility.
Net speed Simplified screenshots:
How to Install the Gnome Shell Extension:
For Ubuntu, you need to firstly install chrome-gnome-shell package by running command in terminal (open terminal from system app launcher):
sudo apt install chrome-gnome-shell
Secondly, go to the extension web page, and click the link to install browser extension if asked.
Refresh the page, and you can finally turn on the toggle icon to install the Gnome Shell Extension.
To change the extension settings, you may also run command to install the “Extensions” tool in Ubuntu:
sudo apt install gnome-shell-extension-prefs
For Fedora user, run this command instead to install the tool:
sudo dnf install gnome-extensions-app