Resources, the popular system monitor app that’s default in Ubuntu 26.04, released the Beta for the next 51 version yesterday.
As the version number indicates, the new Resources 51 aims to be the default system monitor app for the upcoming GNOME 51 desktop environment.
Resources aims to be default in GNOME
The new version of this free open-source application introduced an experimental option to change the metric that the app uses to determine per-process memory usage.
It’s an hidden option that’s available through /org/gnome/Resources/memory-metric dconf key. User may run gsettings command or use Dconf Editor to set the key value to:
- VmSize – total virtual memory allocated to the process.
- Rss – total physical RAM currently held by the process (private + shared memory).
- RssNoSharedMemory (default) – Rss excluding shared memory.
- RssAnon – physical RAM allocated directly to the process data, no shared memory, no file-backed memory.
- Pss – The most realistic measure of a process’s actual RAM footprint. (private + shared memory / number of processes).
- ApproximatePss – A faster, less resource-intensive calculation of Pss.
For AMD processors with a dedicated NPU (Neural Processing Unit), such as Ryzen 7040, Ryzen 8040, and Ryzen AI 300/400 series, this version added the monitoring support for AMD NPU utilization, power and performance (TOPs).
AMD NPU monitoring, image from resources source page
This beta also added the ibmpowernv hwmon driver to KNOWN_HWMONS, so that it can report temperature for PowerPC CPUs. This driver however does not load on PowerVM LPARs and KVM virtual machines.
It as well includes some improvements to the left side-bar. They include F9 keyboard shortcut to toggle side-bar visibility, render usage details as overlay for the graph, use icons for text in sidebar graphs, and more.
Other changes include:
- Rename app ID to
org.gnome.Resources. - Improve detection of Steam games.
- Accurately associate snap processes with their desktop app.
- Add cli option to disable update halt on suspension.
Get Resources
For more changes about the release as well as the source tarball, go to the Gitlab source page via the link below:
The app provides pre-build Linux package through Flatpak, which is at version 1.10.2 so far, available to install in this Flathub page. However, the link will be possibly obsoleted or re-directed due to the app ID change.
Before the new Flatpak package update, you may try out the new version either by waiting for your Linux Distribution updates (Ubuntu 26.10 and Fedora 45 will probably have it), or, by installing the latest development package from Gnome Nightly repository (see the screenshot below).
