Merging System Monitor with Usage
Must read/see
Background
- Usage application is designed to be a process manager matching the rest of the GNOME ecosystem, and targeted for average Joe, meaning ease of use is a requirement
- System Monitor is full of features, but has a cluttered UI, showing lots of things, but still having the relevant information quite a few clicks away from the user
- During design review of the latest improvements of System Monitor, Allan Day has suggested maybe merging Usage (concept application) and the current System Monitor would be the way to go
- Stefano Facchini (stfacc), the developer who started working on Usage, and Robert Roth (evfool), maintainer of System Monitor agree with merging the two applications:
- as having two separate applications would mean code duplication
- dropping features from System Monitor should be avoided
- the new application would mostly be a new UI for System Monitor extended with the features of Usage
Requirements
Monitoring the following details per-process:
- CPU usage (maybe even per-core)
- Memory usage
- Network usage (current upload/download speed, maybe total upload/download)
- Battery usage
- IO usage (current disk read/write rate)
- Files usage (list of files opened by process)
Process actions to be supported:
- Kill process
- End process
- Change priority of process
- (Maybe Stop/Continue process)
Implementation details
- the application should use libgtop for retrieving the data to display (libgtop being a platform-independent system information library)
- System Monitor is currently a mix of C and C++, Usage is implemented in Vala (Robert Roth suggests Vala+Glade UI being used for the interface implementation, GObject C for the internal details, if required)