Explore SysMonTask: A Linux System Monitor with a Windows‑Like Interface

Thanks to desktop environments, most Linux distributions ship with a built‑in task manager, but SysMonTask provides a Windows‑like interface for deeper system monitoring.

Features

System monitoring graphs.

Displays CPU, memory, disk, network adapter, and single Nvidia GPU statistics.

Supports listing mounted disks in the latest version.

"User Processes" tab allows process filtering and shows recursive CPU, memory, and aggregate values.

Processes can be terminated from the "Processes" tab.

Supports light and dark system themes.

My Experience

SysMonTask requires elevated privileges; it prompts for the administrator password on launch, which can be inconvenient.

During testing, copying a 20 GB file from an external SSD to the laptop’s disk produced clear usage spikes visible in the monitor.

The Process tab conveniently shows cumulative resource utilization at the top of the columns.

The "Killer" button at the bottom left lets you select a process and terminate it after confirmation.

Installation on Linux Distributions

Although lightweight, SysMonTask pulls a ~50 MB archive and occupies about 200 MB on disk due to Python dependencies.

For Ubuntu‑based systems, add the PPA and install via apt:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:camel-neeraj/sysmontask
sudo apt update
sudo apt install sysmontask

Debian‑based distributions can also install from the provided .deb package on the release page.

Because it is open source, the source code is freely available.

Removal

To remove SysMonTask and its PPA:

sudo apt remove sysmontask
sudo add-apt-repository -r ppa:camel-neeraj/sysmontask

Alternatively, the PPA‑Purge tool can be used for a cleaner removal.

Overall, functionality outweighs appearance; SysMonTask offers useful disk performance monitoring and GPU statistics that many other monitors lack.

If you find it helpful, give it a try.