The new beta release of Resources, the system monitor tool Ubuntu 26.04 LTS made its default, is out with expanded stats on AMD NPU activity and temperature reading for PowerPC CPUs.

Users with Ryzen 7040, 8040 and Ryzen AI 300/400-series chips can glean utilisation, power and performance stats for their onboard neural accelerators in the Resources v51 beta. Handy to see if that local AI workload is actually using the NPU or quietly frying the CPU.

An eyebrow might be cocked at the headline mention of “PowerPC”. This beta is able to read PowerPC CPU temps via the kernel’s ibmpowernv hwmon driver. However, the change covers POWER8 and newer chips, not those oldie, toasty ones Apple used to use.

(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 was made more reliable in this beta, per the changelog, and accessibility bolstered further. There’s also a new F9 sidebar toggle shortcut too.

On the UI side, the sidebar has seen “space efficient” changes and now only shows device descriptions for hardware components if there are multiple instances of that device type. 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.