Arjen and David – also other KDE contributors, but I’ll name those two because they suffered the brunt of my questions and merge requests – have come up with KDE Plasma System Monitor, which is an application for monitoring system resource usage, sensors and processes. It is a successor to the venerable ksysguard (14 years between those two posts), and promises better pluggability and a nicer UI.

In packaging System Monitor for FreeBSD, we had forgotten some bits and pieces, so until today the application would start, but not actually display anything useful. There’s lots of new code, and there is a code being moved from one library to another, so here’s a comparison shot of the old libraries and old UI (KSysGuard) and the new tools:

KSysGuard and Plasma System Monitor
KSysGuard and Plasma System Monitor

CPU usage information is all there – and the new UI in System Monitor gives me much much more freedom to do UI design, even if I’ve not used it in the screenshot at all. The CPU monitor widget which can run in the panel or as a separate widget is a lovely dancing bar graph (in rainbow colors, although it needs to be 56px wide in order to display all my cores correctly).

The screenshot also shows that other things – networking, processes, memory use – are not there yet, so there’s plenty left to do. Mostly, I think, it’s porting existing code over and cleaning it up and making it modernly-acceptable to the ksystemstats library which now does most of the work. Having the port available (at all) is just the first step to more MRs making it a fully-worthy successor.

That means I need to work together with my KDE friends. “Darn” (also, there will be coffee).