Mission Control

Many distributions come with software for monitoring a computer's system status. In most cases, these are apps integrated into the desktop environment. Gnome, for example, introduced a system monitor at an early stage and KDE followed suit, providing a graphical front end for system monitoring in the form of KSysGuard [1]. The Mate desktop took over the existing tool from older Gnome versions without changing the visuals, and even Xfce has its own panel applet for displaying system statuses.

Other desktop environments, on the other hand, use terminal programs such as htop or Btop++ [2] with very plain, pseudo-graphic interfaces. Unlike graphical applications, these tools do not give users the ability to select different monitor views at the push of a button.

This is where Mission Center [3] enters the scene. Mission Center, written in the Rust programming language and based on the GTK4 toolkit and Libadwaita, works independently of the desktop environment. With its fresh appearance, it outshines many of the traditional graphical monitoring programs.

Not limited to displaying CPU and RAM utilization and network data transfer rates, Mission Center also displays a variety of additional parameters for mass storage devices and even the performance of graphics processors. In addition to graphical views, Mission Center displays plain statistics for various components. Like other system monitoring tools, Mission Center lets you toggle between various displays at the push of a button; as a result, you can also view tables for loaded applications and services on the active system.

Setup

In addition to the source code, the Mission Center developers offer the software as an AppImage on their GitLab page [4]. You'll also find Mission Center in the Ubuntu Snap Store and on Flathub [5]. Because the AppImage will run on practically any Linux derivative without additional underpinnings, I will be referencing the AppImage in this article.

Use

After starting Mission Center, a modern, three-panel window based on Gnome conventions pops up. On the left, you can see the individual display options in a column with a gray background. The large middle section contains graphical displays for the components listed on the left. On the right, there is another column with transfer rates or component utilization statistics (Figure 1). Mission Center updates the graphs in the middle window segment at short intervals to ensure a good overview of your selected component's current status.

Figure 1: Mission Center, which is reminiscent of the Windows Task Manager, displays numerous parameters of critical hardware components.

The titlebar contains three buttons. The Performance button, which is enabled by default, shows you the Performance view.

Clicking on Apps displays data for active programs in a table containing the program icon, which helps users quickly identify active programs. Mission Center displays applications that start several processes in a tree with branches for each individual process. Figure 2, for example, shows the Firefox web browser is using more than a dozen processes although just five tabs are open, taking 2.2GB RAM to do this.

Figure 2: In the Apps view, the software shows active programs and their resource usage.

To the right of the individual programs and processes, you will find the process IDs (PIDs), the CPU and GPU loads, the RAM requirement, and the mass storage utilization in separate columns of the table. Mission Center also updates these at short intervals. You can right-click on one of the processes to open a menu where you can terminate the process gracefully by selecting Stop Process. If a process does not respond to regular termination, you can use the Force Stop Process option instead.

Clicking on the Services button in the titlebar opens a similar dialog for system services (Figure 3). Along with the individual services, the associated PID and a short description are listed for each service. On the far right, you can open a control menu for the process in question. A single click lets you stop or restart the selected process. Clicking on Details reveals the service's details in a separate window.

Figure 3: Mission Center also displays system services in a clear-cut table.

Settings

To make basic changes to the settings, click on the hamburger menu top right in the program window and open the Preferences entry. In the Preferences dialog, you can modify the design of the graphics and change the update intervals. You can also enable some options for the app display using the slider (Figure 4).

Figure 4: The Preferences dialog is limited to the bare essentials.

Some display functions can also be made more meaningful in the Preferences dialog. For example, Mission Center shows you the total CPU load by default, irrespective of the number of physical and logical processor cores. You can change this by right-clicking on the graph. In the context menu, then select the Change Graph To | Logical Processors option. Mission Center now closes the individual graph and instead displays separate, continuously updated sub-graphs for each logical CPU core (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Selecting Logical Processors displays a separate graph for each logical CPU core.