How to make conky system monitor to work with transparency on Lubuntu 20.04?

I've been using AntiX anew recently and highly recommend it for low-RAM or otherwise "modest" machines as a very good Debian-based distro.

On that, I've really been pleased with the conky system monitor, which works as a transparent information layer on the wallpaper. But I have Lubuntu 20.04 on two workhorses, and also wanted it there.

So how can I get conky to behave in transparent mode on LXDE/Xfce?

I originally installed conky using Synaptic, then read advisories from all over none of which solved this, so I "shifted advice" and tinkered until I nailed it.

So,answering my own question, below is my working ~/.conkyrc file (the local config file) if you are battling to do the same.

-- vim: ts=4 sw=4 noet ai cindent syntax=lua
--[[
Conky, a system monitor, based on torsmo

Any original torsmo code is licensed under the BSD license

All code written since the fork of torsmo is licensed under the GPL

Please see COPYING for details

Copyright (c) 2004, Hannu Saransaari and Lauri Hakkarainen
Copyright (c) 2005-2012 Brenden Matthews, Philip Kovacs, et. al. (see AUTHORS)
All rights reserved.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.


MH: This WORKING FINALLY in elegant transparent mode on Lubuntu 20.04  
    
(NB that 'own window colour' line is irrelevant now - but useful while debugging)

]]

conky.config = {
    alignment = 'top_right',
    border_width = 1,
    cpu_avg_samples = 2,
    default_color = 'white',
    default_outline_color = 'white',
    default_shade_color = 'white',
    draw_borders = false,
    draw_graph_borders = true,
    draw_outline = false,
    draw_shades = false,
    use_xft = true,
    font = 'DejaVu Sans Mono:size=12',
    gap_x = 5,
    gap_y = 60,
    minimum_height = 5,
    minimum_width = 5,
    net_avg_samples = 2,
    no_buffers = true,
    out_to_console = false,
    out_to_stderr = false,
    extra_newline = false,
    own_window = true,
    own_window_transparent = true,
    own_window_argb_visual = false,
    own_window_argb_value = 192,
    own_window_colour = '#337733',
    own_window_type = 'desktop',
    own_window_hints = 'undecorated,sticky,below,skip_taskbar,skip_pager',
    double_buffer = true;
    stippled_borders = 0,
    update_interval = 1.0,
    uppercase = false,
    use_spacer = 'none',
    show_graph_scale = false,
    show_graph_range = false
}

conky.text = [[
${scroll 16 $nodename - $sysname $kernel on $machine | }
$hr
${color grey}Uptime:$color $uptime
${color grey}Frequency (in MHz):$color $freq
${color grey}Frequency (in GHz):$color $freq_g
${color grey}RAM Usage:$color $mem/$memmax - $memperc% ${membar 4}
${color grey}Swap Usage:$color $swap/$swapmax - $swapperc% ${swapbar 4}
${color grey}CPU Usage:$color $cpu% ${cpubar 4}
${color grey}Processes:$color $processes  ${color grey}Running:$color $running_processes
$hr
${color grey}File systems:
 / $color${fs_used /}/${fs_size /} ${fs_bar 6 /}
${color grey}Networking:
Up:$color ${upspeed eth0} ${color grey} - Down:$color ${downspeed eth0}
$hr
${color grey}Name              PID   CPU%   MEM%
${color lightgrey} ${top name 1} ${top pid 1} ${top cpu 1} ${top mem 1}
${color lightgrey} ${top name 2} ${top pid 2} ${top cpu 2} ${top mem 2}
${color lightgrey} ${top name 3} ${top pid 3} ${top cpu 3} ${top mem 3}
${color lightgrey} ${top name 4} ${top pid 4} ${top cpu 4} ${top mem 4}
]]

own_window_argb_value = 192

Transparency value is to hight and sometimes may not seem transparent enough. Depending to background/wallpaper you may like to decrease this value to have better experience