How to get full Conky transparency in KDE 4.11?

Question

On recent versions of KDE (4.10, 4.11 at least), the Conky window does not have a transparent background, despite settings in the .conkyrc file.

Solution

On my Kubuntu 13.10 installation, I got transparency working by doing 2 things:

1. appropriate settings in .conkyrc (see below)
2. Changing the compositing type from 'XRender' to 'OpenGL 3.1' in KDE System Settings > Desktop Effects > Advanced

The "magic" combination of options in my .conkyrc that work are:

own_window yes
own_window_title conky
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
own_window_argb_visual yes
own_window_argb_value 0
own_window_type normal

Note that as long as you use the argb options, you do NOT need to inlude own_window_transparent

if you include only own_window_argb_visual without own_window_argb_value, then own_window_transparent functions as expected.