Recent searches
Search options
Administered by:
I've been talking a bit with folks working on GNOME about the state of the System Monitor app and its handful of community-made alternatives, then I had a thought:
Is it a wild idea to just... not have the app?
Wait wait, put away your pitchforks! We could do something better!
What if the reasons people actually use System Monitor were just exposed more contextually in the OS, for everyone? 
For example...
@cassidy@blaede.familySome of the identified uses for opening system monitor:
• Check if something is hogging bandwidth
• See if an app is pegging the CPU
• Figure out what's eating all the RAM
• Know why your computer's fans are suddenly spinning up
I feel like most of that could be integrated with the system menu where as of recently we expose background apps. Could we expose resource-intensive apps in the same way?
Could per-app bandwidth usage be shown in the networking menu or Settings app, instead?
So we could solve the same problems people are trying to solve with a System Monitor app by just better integrating those things into the system itself.
And then people would of course still be free to use htop or whatever system monitor app they'd like from Flathub or wherever if what they explicitly want is a thing that shows process IDs and graphs and whatnot.
…and then it dawned on me that this was basically the approach we took with elementary OS, which does not ship with a system monitor/task manager/etc.
I think we could do it nicely in GNOME. :)
In a lot of ways this could overlap with the idea of privacy controls being built into the system, and could almost be like Little Snitch for macOS, but built in.
@cassidy wouldn't work for me, the most common reason to look into the system monitor is to find stuck processes, most times not using resources, but blocking something. E.g. node process got lost, something hogging a port or a game not starting, as there's a ghost process of that same game.
@razze hm, interesting. Thanks for sharing! Do you think it would be fine to use something in a CLI for that, or to install an app from the repos/app store?
The problem as I understand it today is that System Monitor is basically unmaintained, out of date, AND doesn’t solve its problem space well—replacing it would be a lot of work and a new codebase to maintain, but maybe we can chip away at common use cases enough by moving those concerns elsewhere.
@razze And I guess if it were removed as a core app, it would continue to exist in its current state, at least.
@cassidy I'm very hopeful for mission center. It just needs to support killing processes. And I guess I would be more then happy.
@razze @cassidy yeah that's basically what I use it for most of if the time as well, I don't like CLI based ones. 
It's nice to spot a process for a hanging app that's hogging CPU and be able to kill it with a click. Whenever I have to do that through SSH, I find it very uncomfortable, which is odd, since I usually like using the CLI.
@cassidy I like the idea.
Unfortunately, the major limitation of system monitor applications in a Flatpak is that they are mostly read only and can not act on other users/system applications or change system settings via elevated privileges using polkit.
Thus I don't see this functionality replacing the system installed "system monitor" but that would likely still be a good feature to add.
@cassidy i dunno, the only reason I use the system monitor app is to show off how fancy my computer is by having some graphs with lots of lines that all go to the top when i run something cpu intensive :)
If i'm actually investigating a problem, I've found that system-monitor simply doesn't provide information with enough detail to be useful, and is so resource hungry itself that it's very likely to influence what you're trying to measure.
@kepstin in which case, there are some good system monitor apps on Flathub you could install to get that same fancy show off experience—but it sounds like it doesn’t provide a good experience for the sort of deeply technical information it tries to anyway, so maybe it shouldn’t be a core app.
@cassidy I think this could work. The use cases you mentioned are the only
Reasons I open the system monitor app. But I’ve got into this habit only after using computers for almost a decade. Before I didn’t even know such a thing existed and usually panicked when the fans start to spin. So easily discoverable system statuses for anomalies would definitely help.
@cassidy It would also be important IMO the ability of stopping processes that are having some problem, like eating CPU or memory for breakfast.
In this context, a system monitor tool. Having a tool to help identify problems like the above, is not that much use without something to deal with the identified process/problems.