Merging System Monitor with Usage

1. Must read/see

• Usage mockups

• Usage application description

• WIP implementation of Usage, far from being feature-complete

2. 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

3. 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)

4. 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)