The System Monitor app Ubuntu comes with with does an okay job of letting you monitor system resources and oversee running processes — but it does look dated.
Now, dated isn’t always a negative – but with System Monitor it is: the app’s graphs and charts are tiny, compact, and lack the glanceability and granular-detail that similar tools on other systems offer.
Thankfully, there are plenty of ace System Monitor alternatives available on Linux, with the Rust-based Resources being the latest tool to the join the club.
And it’s a real looker:
Resources shows real-time graphs showing the utilisation of core system components:
- CPU (combined and logical)
- Memory (including swap)
- GPU (except Intel currently)
- Network Interfaces
- Storage Devices
You can also see a list of running apps and processes, which are separated in this app. These lists show the names of processes (and an icon where relevant), current memory and CPU usage, and are both sortable and searchable.
Selecting an app/process from the list gives you options to view more info about it (e.g., PID, command, number of running processes, containerised status, etc), and activates a big red button you can click to ‘end’ the app/process (a submenu has options to kill, halt, or continue the app/process instead).
A petite Preferences panel provide options to pick a unit (decimal/binary, and celsius/kelvin/fahrenheit); and select a refresh interval from very slow/slow/normal/fast/very fast (though tempting to select, ‘very fast’ can increase CPU usage).
If you don’t like the ‘Windows-iness’ of Mission Center – which you may have briefly spotted it in my Ubuntu 23.10 release video – then Resources is a solid alternative.
Want to try it out?
You’ll need to install Flatpak on Ubuntu, enable Flathub, and (optionally) install GNOME Software to get a graphical frontend for browsing, installing, and removing apps on Flathub. Personally, I find the command line faster.
• Get Resources on Flathub