A new beta of Resources, the system monitor tool Ubuntu 26.04 LTS ships with by default, is out with expanded AMD NPU stats and temperature reporting for PowerPC CPUs.

Users with Ryzen 7040, 8040 and Ryzen AI 300/400-series chips can glean utilisation, power and performance metrics for their onboard neural accelerators. A reassuring way to tell if an AI workload is actually using the NPU rather than quietly frying your CPU.

You might cock an eyebrow at hearing “PowerPC” mentioned. Resources’ support for PowerPC CPU temps uses the ibmpowernv hwmon driver, which covers POWER8 and newer chips and not the oldie, toasty ones Apple used up until the mid-2000s.

PowerPC isn’t dead. Raptor Computing sells POWER9 boards (Talos II, Blackbird) that run Linux with no proprietary firmware and IBM still ships POWER servers too. A niche audience, sure, but this is a hookup to show a number, so power to Resources’ devs for doing it.

Steam game and Snap app detection is said to be more reliable in this beta, and further accessibility improvements made.

On the visual side, the sidebar sees some “space efficient” changes, like only showing device descriptions if there are multiple instances of that device type (new F9 sidebar toggle shortcut too). On pages, usage numbers are overlaid on graphs rather than stacked beneath.

New memory metric options

You can now change how Resources’ memory calculations work using new dconf values for /org/gnome/Resources/memory-metric, switching from “RssNoSharedMemory” (the default) to “VmSize”, “Rss”, “RssAnon”, “ApproximatePss” or “Pss”.

The default RssNoSharedMemory ignores RAM shared with other processes. Pss fixes that by splitting shared memory evenly across every process using it, so the numbers actually add up. ApproximatePss does (roughly) the same job faster but less precisely.

Meanwhile, VmSize reports total virtual memory reserved rather than what’s actually resident in RAM, and RssAnon strips out shared and file-backed memory fully, if you only care about a process’s own private data.

To wit: if none of those sound useful to you, leave the default as it is. But if alternate calculations appeal to your stat-tracking needs, try them – and provide feedback upstream if you notice major discrepancies or weird issues with one active!

Resources 51 is a beta release

Resources is now a GNOME Incubator project in the process of being refined and improved with a view to joining the GNOME Core apps lineup. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS includes it out of the box, so if you like the look and you’re planning to upgrade to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS from 24.04 later this month, you can.

The Resources 51 beta is available to test if you set up the GNOME Nightly Flatpak repo and install it from there. Standard caveats about using and evaluating pre-release software apply, so if something doesn’t work when testing be sure to file a bug upstream.