Mission Center vs. Resources: The Ultimate Linux System Monitor Showdown

The GNOME app ecosystem is on fire these days. Whatever your needs, there's probably an app for that. Or two. Or three (no kidding)! Two of the sleekest apps for monitoring your system (aptly called, "system monitors", of course) are Mission Center, and Resources.

Both use libadwaita to provide slick visuals, responsive GUIs, and familiar functionality for the GNOME desktop environment. But, which one is right for you? I'll attempt to help you answer that question in this article.

Quick Intro of Both Awesome System Monitors

Now that you understand the premise of what we're about, let's get acquainted with both apps. You'll see where they're quite similar in some ways, yet distinct enough to each stand alone.

Mission Center

Mission Center is a detail-oriented system monitor app for the GNOME desktop environment, written primarily in Rust, using GTK4 and libadwaita. Geared towards high efficiency and smooth displays, Mission Center has hardware accelerated graphs for complex CPU, memory, and GPU breakdowns.

Resources

Resources is a relatively minimalist system monitor for the GNOME desktop environment. As a GNOME Circle app, it conforms strictly to the GNOME HIG and its patterns, with an emphasis on simplicity and reduced user effort. Resources is written in Rust and uses GTK4 and libadwaita for its GUI.

Usage: The First Glance

First impressions matter, and with any system monitor, what you see first tells you what's going on before you even click on anything else.

So how do these two stack up? Let's see.

Mission Center: Hardware First, Stats & Figures Upfront

On first launch, Mission Center surfaces your hardware resources right away: CPU, GPUs, memory, drives, and network, with detailed readouts right before your eyes. Combining clean, accessible visuals with thorough device info, Mission Center makes you feel you've hooked up your computer to an advanced scanner — where nothing is hidden from view.

If you like to jump right into the stats and details, Mission Center is just for you.

Resources: Apps & Hardware Side-by-side

Resources displays a combined overview of your apps and hardware resources at first glance. You can get a quick view of which apps are using the most resources, side by side with what hardware resources are most in use. You also get a graph for the system's battery (if present) in the sidebar (not shown here).

It doesn't give you detailed hardware stats and readouts until you "ask" (by clicking on any individual component), but you can still see which resources are under strain at a glance and compare this with which apps are using the most resources.

CPU Performance & Memory Usage

A system monitor is no good if it hogs system resources for itself. They need to be lean and quick to help us wrangle with other applications that aren't. So where do our two contenders fall?

Mission Center: Stealthy on the CPU, kind to memory

Mission Center barely sips the CPU, being negligible enough that it does not show up in your active processes (if you choose this filter) in GNOME System Monitor, even while displaying live details for a selected application.

This is likely due to the fact that Mission Center uses GPU acceleration for graphs, thereby reducing strain on the CPU. It's also relatively light on memory usage, hitting roughly 168MB of usage even while showing detailed process info.

Resources: Light on CPU, easier on memory use

Keeping well within its balanced, lightweight approach, Resources sips the CPU while also keeping memory usage low, at around 136MB. While its use of hardware acceleration could not be confirmed, it's worth noting that Resources keeps graphs visible and active, even when displaying process details. Still, it manages to keep resource usage to a minimum.

Differences: Negligible

As this is one of the few areas where the comparison veers beyond subjectivity, it's important to note that the difference here is not that significant. Both apps are light on resources, especially in the critical area of CPU usage.

The difference in memory usage between the two isn't particularly significant, though for users with limited RAM to spare, Mission Center's slightly higher memory usage could be a consideration to keep in mind.

Process Management & Control

Perhaps the most critical aspect of any system monitor, is not just how well they can show you information, but how much they actually let you do with the information you're given. That's where process management and control come in, so let's look at how these two compare.

What both have in common

As you might expect, each app gives you the typical "Halt/Stop", "Continue", "End", and "Kill" signal controls as standard fare for Linux process management. Both allow you to view details for an individual app or process.

Of course, you also get the common, critical stats, like CPU, Memory, and GPU usage. However, there are distinct, notable differences that can help you decide which one you'd prefer.

Mission Center: More details up front

Both apps and processes are displayed in the same tree view in Mission Center, just separated with a divider. It tries to put more info before you by default, including the Process ID (PID), though only for processes, Shared Memory, and Drive I/O. You can also combine parent and child process data, and show which CPU core any app is running on.

While you get more signals for controlling your processes, like 'Interrupt' (INT), 'Hangup' (HUP), and 'Terminate' (TERM), you don't get the option to display or adjust the 'niceness' of any process, which, for those not in the know, tells the system what priority a process should have.

Standout feature: Service management

One thing that sets Mission Center apart from other system monitors is its ability to display and control processes through Systemd. With Systemd being pretty much the standard across most distros, this is a feature that many power users will want in their toolkit, especially those who would prefer to avoid the CLI for such tasks as restarting services like Pipewire.

Resources: Crouching data, hidden customization

Interestingly, while Resources might appear to be the more conservative choice, it actually gives more options for what data you can display. As an example, Resources allows you to view GPU video encoder/decoder usage on a per-app basis. Another handy feature is the option to change a process' niceness value, though you must first enable this in the preferences.

In Resources, apps and processes are displayed in separate views, which have some notable differences. For instance, there is no "User" column in the 'Apps' view, and you cannot change the priority of an app.

Standout feature: Changing processor affinity

Resources features a hidden gem in its process view, which is the ability to change process affinity on a per-process basis. This is especially handy for power users who want to make use of modern multi-core systems, where efficiency and performance cores often dwell in the same CPU.

With a clever combination of niceness values (priority) and CPU affinity, advanced users can use Resources to pull maximum performance or power savings without having to jump into the terminal.

Installation & Availability

Mission Center: A package for everyone

Mission Center is included by default with Aurora, Bazzite, Bluefin and DeLinuxCo. It's also available through an official Flatpak hosted on Flathub. The project provides AppImage downloads for both AMD64 and ARM64 architectures, and a Snap package in the Snap Store.

Ubuntu users can install Mission Center with Snap by running:

# Install Mission Center:
sudo snap install mission-center

If even these are not enough, you can also get Mission Center in many distributions directly from their repositories (though mileage may vary on the version that's actually available in such instances).

The project provides a full list of repositories (with version numbers) in their Readme file.

Resources: A conservative, but universal approach

Being part of the GNOME Circle, Resources is assuredly packaged as a Flatpak and available via Flathub. These are official packages and provide the experience most likely to offer the best stability and newest available features.

Unofficial packages are also available for Arch and Fedora.

Arch users can install it with:

pacman -S resources

Whereas Fedora users can install it using dnf and Copr:

dnf copr enable atim/resources
dnf install resources

Final thoughts: Which one's for you?

That's a question only you can answer, but hopefully you now have enough information to help you make an informed decision. With the diversity of apps arising in this season of mass Linux development and adoption, it's only a matter of time before you find (or create) your favourite.

If you're looking for deep hardware monitoring up front and don't need heavy customization, Mission Center is more likely to be a good fit for you. However, if you're looking for a quick bird's eye-view of apps and hardware at a glance, with the option to dig deeper where needed, Resources is probably more your speed.

Of course, you can install and try both apps if you'd like, that's part of the fun and freedom of Linux. Feel free to let us know what you think in the comments.