This free Linux tool makes it easy to check your PC battery and disk usage - here's how

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Mission Center has a major update.
• New features include memory compression and battery stats.
• The app is free to use and install on most Linux distros.

Mission Center is a system monitoring app for Linux that very quickly became my go-to. It offers real-time CPU, memory, disk, and network usage monitoring; information on real-time app and process resource usage; the ability to stop or force stop running applications; configurable update speeds; process state merging; and can remember sorting (filtering).

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Recently, the developers behind Mission Center have released an upgrade that adds some pretty key bits of system information that might well have you switching from whatever system monitor you're using.

Now, you'll find the inclusion of three new options:

• Battery
• Memory compression stats
• Power draw and temperature

Two of the above features will be particularly helpful for (but not limited to) laptop users. Let me explain each feature.

Battery

If you're a laptop user, the new Battery page should be a real boon to keep you informed of not only how much juice your battery has, but also the voltage, power, time to full, charge cycles, and detailed information about the physical battery (such as serial number, type, energy when full, and minimum voltage).

All the battery info you need is right here.

Jack Wallen/ZDNET

In comparison to the information a typical desktop environment gives you about your battery, this is incredibly helpful. For instance, when I click on the battery icon in KDE Plasma, I see Time To Full and Battery Health. That's it. If I really want to dig into the battery information, I'll most likely need a third-party or command-line tool. 

Or, I use Mission Center.

But that's not all. 

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I've had Mission Center installed on my desktop for some time. Obviously, my desktop doesn't use a battery, but my wireless mouse does. Mission Center even gives me detailed information about my mouse battery, too. 

My Logitech Mouse battery is shown here.

Jack Wallen/ZDNET

Although Mission Center doesn't offer nearly as much information about my mouse battery, it at least tells me the current charge percentage, the serial, type, and powering system.

Memory

One very nice addition to the Mission Center is that the Memory page now shows compression stats. This will be a welcome addition to anyone who uses either zRAM or zswap. I ran a test on this using a laptop with KDE Fedora. After setting up zRAM to use 16GB for compression, it clearly shows this in the "Swap available" category.

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If you use memory compression, you'll appreciate this update.

Jack Wallen/ZDNET

Had this not been using zRAM, the "Swap available" listing would have been considerably lower.

Power Draw

If whatever you do on your Linux machine depends heavily on the GPU (such as gaming or AI), you'll be glad to know that there's now a GPU Power Draw stat, as well as clock speeds and temperature stats.

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The Power Draw stat will be important to those who depend on their GPU for CPU offloading.

Jack Wallen/ZDNET

On that same page, there's also now a Video encode/decode utilization graph. Just watching a YouTube video shows when video encode/decode is in use. The GPU on my laptop is made by AMD, so I couldn't push this with local AI (Ollama), as it depends on Nvidia hardware to offload processing to a GPU.

I would imagine, however, with an Nvidia GPU, you could better track usage when working with local AI.

Other improvements

Other Mission Center improvements include:

• An overhauled graphing backend (for smoother animations/rendering)
• Improved Snap package (now uses the core24 runtime for better performance)
• AppImage package is smaller and uses quick-sharun, so it no longer depends on FUSE
• New keyboard shortcuts were added
• Connection state is now listed in the Networks section

If you haven't experienced Mission Center, I would highly recommend you install it now, so you can see what one of the best system monitors on the market is like.