A new version of Mission Center, the super-slick system monitor for Linux, has been released.
I’ve written about this utility a number of times before (here and on OMG! Linux) so if you read this or that blog you—aside from being awesome—may already be familiar with it.
And if you’re not? Well, you’re in for a treat.
As Linux system monitors go (and there are more than a few) Mission Center is easily one of the best for fans of graphical user-interfaces who want to check their system’s CPU and RAM usage.
Mission Center monitors CPU (overall or pre-thread), memory and swap usage, disk usage and transfer speeds, network in/out, and GPU usage1 including encode/decode usage, memory usage, power consumption, temperature.
It also lists lots of related information, e.g., CPU series/model and clock speed, network card name, frequency, and IP address, in the respective sections. This saves needing to open a standalone system info tool or probe the command line.
It also also has a built-in process list (so you can see which apps and services are using resources).
Those features have been in Mission Center for a while, but since I last wrote about Mission Center late last year it’s picked up a number of new features.
Mission Center’s New Features
The latest release (v0.5) adds a new Services page. This lets you see and control system services using systemd or OpenRC (section hides if an unsupported service manager is used). A details/info popover can tell you more about what the selected service does.
Mission Center is graph heavy. It’s long allowed you to control refresh/polling interval but those controls are now more fine-grained, and it’s possible to customise chart data points. To make graphs less spiky an option for smoother graphs added.
Hot-plugging disks (e.g., external drive) and network devices (e.g., Wi-Fi dongle) is supported too, so you can monitor those without needing to re-launch the app. It also gained the ability to report optical drive use – which is neat!
The CPU section also now lists the frequency governor and driver (where supported) alongside its existing (and extensive) processor info stats:
Various fixes feature, VRAM usage has been reduced, and UI and UX elements throughout the app tweaked to ensure it looks better and behaves more consistently.
The Mission Center homepage has lots more details on this tool which, for those wondering, is written in Rust and GTK4/libadwaita.
Get Mission Center on Ubuntu
You can get Mission Center on Flathub.
For a portable solution, you can also download an official AppImage from the releases page on the Mission Center Gitlab.
Remember you need to do a few things to get AppImages to work in Ubuntu 23.10 and above, and (more general point) be aware some AppImages might not run/work due to the AppArmor changes developers introduced in the latest LTS.
Thanks Romeo!
- Experimental; how much info the GPU panel is able to show can vary between GPU models and OEMs ↩︎