KDE Plasma 5.21 Desktop Environment to Ship with a New System Monitor App

New System Monitor App

One of the major changes of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.21 desktop environment series, due for release in early 2021, is a new app called Plasma System Monitor.

Developed by Arjen Hiemstra during the past two years using Kirigami UI Framework and Plasma’s KSystemStats system statistics service, the new Plasma System Monitor app is here as a drop-in replacement for the KSysGuard utility that currently ships by default with the KDE Plasma desktop environment.

The Plasma System Monitor app promises not only a fancier and modern user interface, but also a simpler way for monitoring system resources on your KDE Plasma-based GNU/Linux distribution, along with more powerful customization options and cool new features.

Major new features include a revamped Overview page that prompts users on startup with a quick overview of their entire Linux system, including available resources like CPU, memory, disk space, and network, as well as a list of the applications that are consuming the most resources.

Plasma System Monitor also comes with a new Applications page to show you more details statistics and graphs about all running applications, an updated Processes page that now lets you select the “Line Chart” display mode for any column that displays a numeric value.

Also redesigned is the History page, which now displays the CPU chart stacked by default. Furthermore, the app comes with a completely new UI for creating and editing pages so you can fully customize its look and feel and the sensors you want to see at a first glance.

“This app has been in development for almost two years and it’s really cool,” said Nate Graham on his blog. “We’re expecting it to eventually replace KSysGuard once it’s gotten some more use in the wild, but for now it is an independent release. Distros should be packaging it soon.”

The plan for the new Plasma System Monitor app is to be included by default in the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.21 desktop environment series, which will see the light of day on February 16th, 2021. More features will be added in the coming weeks/months until its release, such as GPU consumption support (usage, temperature, etc.).

But, for now, it’s available for download as a standalone package from here, which you can compile and install on your current KDE Plasma 5.20 installations. It should also be available soon from the software repositories of some of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions, so look for plasma-systemmonitor if you want to test it.

Image credits: Nate Graham

Last updated 3 years ago

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