System Monitoring

Mission Center, a graphical system monitor, groups all important system statuses in a compact, intuitive interface.

-  By Erik Bärwaldt

Many distributions come with software for monitoring a computer’s system status. In most cases, these are apps integrated into the desktop environment. Gnome, for example, introduced a system monitor at an early stage and KDE followed suit, providing a graphical front end for system monitoring in the form of KSysGuard [1]. The Mate desktop took over the existing tool from older Gnome versions without changing the visuals, and even Xfce has its own panel applet for displaying system statuses.

Other desktop environments, on the other hand, use terminal programs such as htop or Btop++ [2] with very plain, pseudo-graphic interfaces. Unlike graphical applications, these tools do not give users the ability to select different monitor views at the push of a button.

Figure 1: Mission Center, which is reminiscent of the Windows Task Manager, displays numerous parameters of critical hardware components.

This is where Mission Center [3] enters the scene. Mission Center, written in the Rust programming language and based on the GTK4 toolkit and Libadwaita, works independently of the desktop environment. With its fresh appearance, it outshines many of the traditional graphical monitoring programs.

Not limited to displaying CPU and RAM utilization and network data transfer rates, Mission Center also displays a variety of additional parameters for mass storage devices and even the performance of graphics processors. In addition to graphical views, Mission Center displays plain statistics for various components. Like other system monitoring tools, Mission Center lets you toggle between various displays at the push of a button; as a result, you can also view tables for loaded applications and services on the active system.