SysMonTask Review: A Linux System Monitor with a Windows‑Style Task Manager UI

Thanks to desktop environments, most Linux distributions ship with a task manager, but SysMonTask offers a Windows‑style alternative that combines compactness with advanced monitoring capabilities.

What Is SysMonTask?

SysMonTask is an open‑source system monitor written in Python. It describes itself as a Linux system monitor with the practicality and compactness of the Windows Task Manager, providing higher‑level control and observation.

Key Features

System monitoring graphs.

Statistics for CPU, memory, disk, network adapters, and a single Nvidia GPU.

Support for listing mounted disks (added in the latest version).

“User Processes” tab with process filtering, showing recursive CPU, memory, and aggregate values.

Ability to terminate processes directly from the “Processes” tab.

Support for system themes (dark and light).

Hands‑On Experience

Running SysMonTask requires elevated privileges; the program prompts for the administrator password at launch, which can be inconvenient for users who dislike running a task manager with sudo.

During testing, disk usage remained stable, but copying a 20 GB file from an external SSD to the laptop produced visible usage spikes on the graphs. The Process tab conveniently displays cumulative resource utilization at the top of each column.

The “Killer” button, located at the bottom left, allows users to select a process and terminate it after a confirmation prompt.

Installation on Ubuntu‑Based Distributions

Although lightweight, SysMonTask pulls in Python dependencies, downloading a ~50 MB archive and occupying roughly 200 MB of disk space.

At the time of writing, SysMonTask is available via a PPA for Ubuntu‑based systems. Install it with the following commands:

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

Debian‑based distributions can also install the provided .deb package from the release page, or use pip for a manual Python‑based installation.

Removal

To uninstall SysMonTask, run: sudo apt remove sysmontask Then remove the PPA:

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

Alternatively, the ppa-purge utility can cleanly remove PPA packages.

Conclusion

For users who prioritize functionality over appearance, SysMonTask offers useful disk‑performance monitoring and GPU statistics that many other Linux system monitors lack. If the Windows‑style UI appeals to you, give SysMonTask a try.