System Monitoring Center – the name is pretty self-explanatory. It’s an open-source, feature-packed, and all-in-one application for monitoring all the essential system resources for Linux.
Reasons to use SMC over the default Linux system monitors
Most Linux distributions, especially the popular ones, have pretty decent default system monitoring tools.
Even though they do a good job at allowing you to graphically monitor how your system is using hardware resources, they’re geared towards the average user, meaning they lack extensive features and capabilities.
One example of this would be the CPU frequency, which is not displayed by most default system monitoring tools.
Another reason why you should give this app a chance is how it looks. Granted, this is not of paramount importance, usually, to Linux users, but SMC is built using GTK3 and Python 3.
This means that it’s remarkably lightweight, fast, and more importantly, it looks really stylish (capable of adapting to your system’s theme with ease).
Last but not least, it’s surprisingly customizable, as it offers tons of options and configuration abilities per tab.
Features at a glance
The whole point of using System Monitoring Center over the default ones baked into most Linux distributions is to have a better view of what’s going on with your system.
With its help, you can view separate stats for your computer’s RAM, CPU, GPU, Disk, and Network usage, as well as useful details about other types of sensors.
You are provided with various interesting options such as the ability to display the average usage or the usage per core, select the precision point of CPU frequencies (and other useful stats), filter system processes by user, and even manage them, control startup services and apps.
Other noteworthy aspects include the option to control the state update interval, control the hardware selection options (CPU cores, disks, network, cards, GPUs, etc.) as well as toggle a floating summary widget. And, it even supports ARM architecture.
Verdict
System Monitoring Center is still a very young project, so it still has a long way to go (hopefully) until it reaches its full potential.
Speaking of potential, it’s quite clear that SMC is worth having around if you’re a performance-oriented Linux user. If not for looks and customization options, then at least for the fact that it somewhat eliminates the need for other Terminal/command-line-based tools.
