While I understand the intention behind trying to improve KDE System Monitor to reach feature parity with Ksysguard, the reality is Ksysguard should just be undeprecated. System Monitor (KSM for convenience) is fine as a system dashboard, but it’s simply not trying to replace Ksysguard and I don’t think it can be made to.
Ksysguard was function over form, it showed all relevant information, did it as minimally as possible, let you do lots of technical stuff easilly, etc. KSM is not trying to do any of this. It’s form over function and is sacrificing direct utiliy for aesthetics. That’s fine as an option (though a better name would be “dashboard” or “overview” or something IMO) but it simply won’t ever be a replacement for something that’s strictly function over form like Ksysguard. Even if KSM had complete feature parity it still would be far worse than Ksysguard as far as I’m concerned because I just do not like it’s underlying design philosophies. I do not want the tool that I use to send kill commands to stubborn applications to have fancy panes or anything, I just want it to be functional. KSM is trying to be something like Stacer, it’s not trying to be like Ksysguard - and that’s fine right up until Ksysguard is deprecated because KSM exists. These are different applications with different design philosophies and different goals. KSM can’t emulate something like the minimal “system activity” window version of Ksysguard that opens with ctrl+esc because it’s not trying to be minimal like that. It is trying to be a dashboard, monitor, or overview and that’s an entirely different usecase to Ksysguard. We can open as many bug reports, feature requests, PR’s etc. as we want, but at the end of the day these are just different applications with different goals. One is trying to be a simple interface that lets you manage stubborn processes, tweak low level things like process niceness, etc. and the other is trying to be a nice and clean interface that shows your general system state.
Personally my issue isn’t that KSM is bad or lacks feature parity, it’s that Ksysguard has been actively deprecated and been rendered hard to install despite it’s alleged replacement not only failing to meet feature parity, but having such a wildly different design philosophy that it will never be a replacement. Yes, KDE is primarily volunteer developed, but this thread isn’t about KSM being bad, it’s about Ksysguard being removed. The issue isn’t that KSM lacks feature parity or isn’t good, it’s that Ksysguard, a completely functional, extremely light, very well made and lean application, has been intentionally removed because another application that’s far heavier, much less information dense, less responsive and, at least in my opinion, worse designed/concieved alternative exists. I should not have to use a third party AUR package to install a completely functional tool that used to be a part of my DE. That is a massive feature regression in every sense of the word. (phrase? whatever, you get the point) Ksysguard is a simple utility to do a simple job, it is essentially just a slightly nicer GUI version of something like btop or htop. KSM is not trying to be that and that means it will never be a replacement.
These are different applications built to do different things yet one has been actively removed and made hard to access because the other exists. If I have to pick between Ksysguard which has been deprecated for years and it’s supposed successor even after 5 more years of development, I’m still picking Ksysguard. I don’t want a dashboard, I want a simple, lean utility like Ksysguard. Feature parity is only half of the conversation, the entire other half is user experience and I don’t care whether KSM has feature parity or not because it’s trying to be a dashboard when I just want a simple manager. If other users want a dashboard, alright - it’s linux, the entire schtick is user choice. I have no objections to KSM existing or being developed. My objections are in it being a replacement for Ksysguard when these are entirely differnet applications with different usecases, different design philosophies and, yes, different features.
Do I personally consider KSM bad? Yes, I consider it a downgrade even to the windows 11 task manager. I do not think it is a good application. There are not many KDE applications I would consider flat out bad, but KSM is definitely among them. I do not like KSM. However, I wouldn’t care if it was just an option. My issue is solely that an excellent application like Ksysguard has been intentionally deprecated and removed because of it, when they aren’t even trying to be the same thing. Netflix is not a replacement for youtube. Yes, you can watch videos on both, and strictly speaking they could fill the same roles since youtube has support for paid content and they technically are near feature parity. However, they have entirely different goals as companies, they build/built their user interfaces to serve an entirely different purpose, and they just aren’t comparable. If you were told that “sorry, youtube has been discontinued, just use netflix instead” you would be rightfully confused and probably a little pissed. “Feature parity” is not all that matters. If you want perfect feature parity, the command line is the one to beat, not Ksysguard. User experience is what ultimately matters, and the user experience for Ksysguard is entirely different to KSM for reasons that have nothing to do with feature completeness.
One application should never be deprecated and removed because another entirely different and unrelated application exists, yet as far as I’m concerned that’s exactly what happened.
