I would like to announce the preview release of Plasma System Monitor. It can be downloaded from here 1 or you can browse the source code directly on KDE Invent. Please see the readme file for what is needed to build or run it. If you run into any bugs, please report them on bugs.kde.org.
Plasma System Monitor is a brand new UI for monitoring system resources. It is built on top of Kirigami and a new system statistics service called "KSystemStats" that was debuted in Plasma 5.19. It shares a lot of code with the new system monitor applets that were also introduced in Plasma 5.19. It is meant to be a successor to KSysGuard.
History
Almost two years ago a project was started to create a new backend for monitoring system resources. This was initially intended to support a new set of system monitor widgets for Plasma. While working on this, we realised that the system monitor application could also do with a refresh, which would be a lot simpler now that we had a new system to build upon. After a little bit of iteration we had something that I was mostly happy with, with one major missing feature, there was no way of adding custom pages like KSysGuard has. To support this, we ended up unifying the display code between Plasma System Monitor and Plasma's system monitor applets, allowing one to select different display styles in the applet and also when editing pages in Plasma System Monitor.
Features
On startup, you will be greeted by the Overview page, that has been designed to give a quick overview of your entire system. It provides a view of important core resources: memory, disk space, network and CPU usage. It also provides a small version of the same table as used on the Applications page to give you a quick view of what applications are consuming the most resources.
Another new feature is the Applications page. This shows you all running applications along with detailed statistics and graphs for those applications. This makes heavy use of the grouping features that were recently introduced to Plasma. See David Edmundson's blog for more details about this.
The Processes page is very similar to the one in KSysGuard, but we have tried our best to streamline it and remove some of the inconsistencies in it. For example, you can now select the "Line Chart" display mode for any column that displays a numeric value. Similarly, the tree view mode no longer requires displaying all processes, but is now a simple mode toggle. (Please note: The tree view mode unfortunately requires Plasma 5.21 because some parts did not make it for the Plasma 5.20 release.)
The History page has undergone the least functional changes, the most prominent one is that the CPU chart will now be displayed stacked by default.
Should you find the pre-made pages lacking, there is a completely new UI to create and edit pages. The editing UI allows you to divide the page into several different rows, columns and sections. You can then select which sensors you want to display in which way.
The Future
Both the application and the underlying statistics system are still undergoing a lot of development. For example, we have been working on replacing a lot of the old statistics collection code with new code that makes use of existing libraries and systems that simply did not yet exist when the original code was written. This reduces the amount of work that needs to be done to maintain things and allows us to expose new features, like support for GPUs. For Plasma System Monitor specifically, the plan is to include it by default with Plasma 5.21. We will probably not be replacing KSysGuard immediately, but longer term that is the goal.
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These tarballs were generated from git commit
098b91556901ccb611028b3a9156de61295b664cwith SHA256 sumec0af476c7cf992a3fc43af4e7f066c22757b7c196ee49fdbc4286bdf02948d11. They have been signed by Jonathan Riddell with key7F05997E pub rsa2048 2016-09-06 2D1D 5B05 8835 7787 DE9E E225 EC94 D18F 7F05 997E Jonathan Riddell <jr org>.
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