A major new release of Mission Center, a modern system monitor app for Linux desktops, has been released.
Fans of this Rust-based GTK4/libadwaita system monitoring tool (which to address the recurring elephant in the room does indeed have a user interface inspired by—now I’d argue superior to—the Windows system monitor app) will find a lot to like in the latest update.
I’m not going to recap all of this tool’s existing features in this post as I’ve covered this app a few times in the past. The Mission Center homepage has more details for the uninitiated.
Instead, I’m going focus on what’s changed in the latest version, released at the weekend.
Mission Center 0.6: What’s New?
Mission Center 0.6.0 adds a new Fan page. This does exactly you expect: list the names of contributors and supporters—wait, no; the fan page actually tracks system fans and reports their RPM, PWM, and temperature information (where supported).
I can’t share a screenshot of the new Fan page as none of my laptops report that information to the system. From the merge request, System76 laptops and ThinkPads offer best support for relaying those stats, but other vendors vary from some to none.
Ever wished you you could hide or rearrange hardware listed in the Performance sidebar? Now you can! If you don’t care about disk activity for internal disks you’re not booted from, and have no need to see flatline activity for an ethernet port sat idle, toggle them off.
Mission Center 0.6 gives the Memory page a revamp in order to “convey more information”. Committed memory is now plotted on the real-time graph (as a dashed line), while swap gets its own dedicated graph box so you can visualise its (lack of, hopefully) usage.
The GPU page makes it clearer to see which GPU features are monitored, and Mission Center 0.6.0 shows GTT usage for discrete AMD GPUs and iGPUs (where supported) as both a numerical reading in the stats section, and as a dashed line on the GPU memory graph.
Want to know how much data your system has used since you logged in? The Network page now reports total data transfer stats for the active session (or since the network was joined, if that changes after logging in).
Other changes:
zenpowersupport when monitoring AMD CPU temperature- Support for more device types in Network Page
- Option to use bytes instead of bits for network data transfer info
- App icons now used for processes which belong to a known application
- NVTOP updated for GPU support/detection improvements
- CPU frequency governor and power mode hidden if not supported
- Graph labels made more consistent between pages
- About and Preferences dialogs now use AdwDialog
- Memory leak when filtering apps/processes fixed
- CPU usage spike when app first launched resolved
- Using GNOME (47) runtime in all supported packaging formats
- Initial support for Snap package
I don’t exactly have the best hardware to showcase many of Mission Center’s features and information, but even the modest capabilities my crop of yesteryear tech tout are easier to gauge and monitor in this than other system monitors.
Despite boasting a design that is modern and clean this app puts a lot of information on show. In some ways it’s both a system resource monitor, service manager, and a hardware info tool – yet doesn’t feel as overwhelming or as verbose as that description makes it sound!
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 currently undergoing review; and those who prefer an all-in-one portable format can download an AppImage from the releases page on the Mission Center Gitlab.
Thanks QwertyC!