GNOME Usage is a new GNOME application to visualize system resources such as memory consumption and disk space. It has been developed by Petr Stetka, a high school intern in our Red Hat office in Brno. Petr is an outstanding coder for such a young fellow and has done a great job with Usage!
Usage is powered by libgtop, the same library used by GNOME System Monitor. One is not a replacement for the other, they complement our user experience by offering two different use cases: Usage is for the everyday user that wants to check which application is eating their resources, and System Monitor is for the expert that knows a bit of operating system internals and wants more technical information being displayed. Besides, Usage has a bit of Baobab too. It contains a Storage panel that allows for a quick analysis of disk space.
The Storage panel has been recently rewritten both in the backend and user interface. It is much faster at listing the filesystem tree and much nicer to interact with.
The screenshot above shows how it looks like in my Videos folder. Selecting a file in the sidebar makes the slice in the pie chart pop. The filesystem tree is presented in a DzlStackList, so getting back to the parent folder is smooth and pleasant.
Each file type gets a different color, and these are consistent. Directories are indicated by a bigger ball in the list. Clicking an item opens the corresponding file. Selecting its checkbox allows for batch deletion. Very intuitive!
GNOME Usage is available in the Fedora repositories. Before you ask, there isn’t a Flatpak because libgtop needs access to the processes running in the host. I plan to work on introducing a Usage daemon that will enable Usage to be Flatpaked AND would allow us to provide historical performance data instead of just real time.
All in all, there’s more coming to Usage soon. Peter is now moving into other opportunities and continuing his studies, so I will continue his work in Usage. If you are interested in contributing to the project, you can reach me out on IRC #usage. Stay tuned!