Possibly conky is loading before the display is available, so it starts but never connects to the display. Try adding a --pause= argument to your conky call.

From man conky:

--

       -p | --pause= SECONDS

              Time to pause/wait before actually starting Conky.

--

I am also running 21.10 and ran into the same issue. Adding --pause=5 was enough of a delay to resolve the problem. Your timing may vary.

Edit:

I have another system with the same problem and this solution did not fix the problem. https://github.com/brndnmtthws/conky/issues/1087 suggests this is an issue with conky not waiting for Xwayland to load. I built the most recent version of conky and had the same issue.

As a quick-and-dirty workaround, I changed my startup to a script which calls conky, waits, and then forces conky to reload its configuration:

#!/bin/sh



killall conky

/usr/bin/conky -d

sleep 5

killall -SIGUSR1 conky