This free Linux tool makes it easy to check your PC

What happened

Mission Center is a system monitoring app for Linux that very quickly became my go-to. It offers real-time CPU, memory, disk, and network usage monitoring; information on real-time app and process resource usage; the ability to stop or force stop running applications; configurable update speeds; process state merging; and can remember sorting (filtering).

This will be a welcome addition to anyone who uses either zRAM or zswap. I ran a test on this using a laptop with KDE Fedora. After setting up zRAM to use 16GB for compression, it clearly shows this in the "Swap available" category. Had this not been using zRAM, the "Swap available" listing would have been considerably lower.

If whatever you do on your Linux machine depends heavily on the GPU (such as gaming or AI), you'll be glad to know that there's now a GPU Power Draw stat, as well as clock speeds and temperature stats. On that same page, there's also now a Video encode/decode utilization graph. Just watching a YouTube video shows when video encode/decode is in use.

Why it matters

Recently, the developers behind Mission Center have released an upgrade that adds some pretty key bits of system information that might well have you switching from whatever system monitor you're using. Now, you'll find the inclusion of three new options: Two of the above features will be particularly helpful for (but not limited to) laptop users. Let me explain each feature.

If you're a laptop user, the new Battery page should be a real boon to keep you informed of not only how much juice your battery has, but also the voltage, power, time to full, charge cycles, and detailed information about the physical battery (such as serial number, type, energy when full, and minimum voltage).

In comparison to the information a typical desktop environment gives you about your battery, this is incredibly helpful. For instance, when I click on the battery icon in KDE Plasma, I see Time To Full and Battery Health. That's it. If I really want to dig into the battery information, I'll most likely need a third-party or command-line tool. I've had Mission Center installed on my desktop for some time.

Obviously, my desktop doesn't use a battery, but my wireless mouse does. Mission Center even gives me detailed information about my mouse battery, too. Although Mission Center doesn't offer nearly as much information about my mouse battery, it at least tells me the current charge percentage, the serial, type, and powering system. One very nice addition to the Mission Center is that the Memory page now shows compression stats.

What to watch

The GPU on my laptop is made by AMD, so I couldn't push this with local AI (Ollama), as it depends on Nvidia hardware to offload processing to a GPU. I would imagine, however, with an Nvidia GPU, you could better track usage when working with local AI.

If you haven't experienced Mission Center, I would highly recommend you install it now, so you can see what one of the best system monitors on the market is like.