Linux system monitoring app Mission Center has put out its first update in 6 months – and it’s a big one!

Mission Center 1.0 adds new hardware tracking, UI tweaks, and refactors its backend to provide palapble performance improvements, boost the app’s responsiveness and minimise ‘time deviations between refresh cycles’.

The latter may sound a tad dry on the ‘excitement’ scale but, arguably, it’s a big thing: a real-time monitoring app is used for, well, real-time monitoring and those tweaks ensure hardware and system process info shown is more precise.

For a closer lookout the “visible” changes in this release, read on.

Mission Center 1.0: New Features

Below is overview of what’s new/changed in the Mission Center 1.0 release only. This is not a recap, review or rundown of Mission Center’s features in general, i.e., the features it already has.

UDisks Integration

S.M.A.R.T. data now accessible in Mission Center

Mission Center 1.0 integrates with udisks, the standard storage device manager used by most (if not all) Linux distributions.

The integration bolsters Mission Center’s storage pages with the option to view detailed SMART data (for SATA and NVME drives, where supported) and can eject mounted storage drives directly (and show any error messages should they fail to eject).

SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) is a monitoring system built into modern hard drives and SSDs. It relays info on e.g., temperature, uptime, bad sectors and error rates, making it useful when identifying possible drive issues.

Mission Center 1.0 also now shows ‘total’ read/write data for disks (for that session) on the device page too, allowing you to avail yourself of even more stats.

App Network Usage

See network usage on a per-process basis

It’s now possible to see per-process network usage in Mission Center via the Apps/Processes page.

This feature requires nethogs to be installed (it’s in the Ubuntu repos), and running without root. To do this, use setcap on which nethogs, using this command from the Mission Center wiki:

sudo setcap "cap_net_admin,cap_net_raw,cap_dac_read_search,cap_sys_ptrace+pe" "$(which nethogs)"

Once enabled a new ‘network’ column will be appended to the apps and processes page. You can click the header to sore by network activity, if needed.

Raspberry Pi GPU Monitoring

Mission Center adds GPU reporting on Raspberry Pi, but…

This version of Mission Center includes Raspberry Pi GPU monitoring (by way of NVTOP, which only supports the feature in its newest release running on linux-rpi kernel v6.12+, and some features, like decoding usage, only available on Pi 4 devices).

I was curious to see if it might work on Ubuntu 25.04, which ships with Linux kernel 6.12. Sadly, it does not. I installed and ran Mission Center 1.0 on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 with Ubuntu 25.04 but no GPU was detected.

However, fellow GUI system monitoring apps Resources added Raspberry Pi GPU monitoring in its latest release. That does detect the Raspberry Pi GPU (with limitations) on Ubuntu, so if you want to monitor your graphics usage graphically, try Resources instead.

Other Changes

Want performance graphs to slide smoothly, as they do in GNOME’s native System Monitor app? If so, this version of Mission Center offers a new toggle to enable them. Sliding graphs can impact overall performance though, so keep that in mind.

And if you’d rather run the app in dark or light mode, irrespective of your system-wide setting, there’s now controls to do that.

Mission Center 1.0’s features at-a-glance:

  • Udisks integration w/ SMART data (SATA & NVME, if supported)
  • Per-process network usage (requires nethogs)
  • Services page now shows unloaded services
  • Apps Page revamped, more info shown
  • Configure units to use Base-2, Base-10, Bits or Bytes 
  • Memory reporting improved
  • Support for keyboard shortcuts
  • Maximum bitrate shown for all network interfaces 
  • Nvtop update with better GPU compatibility
  • Performance page sidebars reordered
  • Network & disk now show totals
  • Option to set light/dark independently of system

In all, another solid update for this slick system monitoring app.

Mission Center does borrow design cues from the Windows 11 Task Manager—some people are put off by this—yet it’s arguably an improvement over it inspiration: it shows more information, has a more logical and ordered layout, and provides customisation controls.

It’s to my mind one of the best-in-class GTK4/libadwaita apps available.

Install Mission Center

Mission Center is free, open-source software available for most major Linux distributions. 

You can get latest stable release of Mission Center on Flathub; an official Snap build is also available, while favouring a portable format can download an AppImage from the releases page on the Mission Center Gitlab.