Created attachment 138430 [details] old applet SUMMARY The System Load Viewer applet was dropped recently from Plasma and it is said that System Monitor replaces it. Please consider making System Monitor Sensor:Memory Usage and Individual Core Usage look and function like the old System Load Viewer. The new applets are not as compact as the old applet and do not deliver the same information as the old applet. The old applet using its "Compact bar", "CPUs separately", and "Set Colors Manually" settings was compact and information-rich. The CPU bar charts showed total CPU and application, nice, system, and I/O wait in different colors. The memory bar showed application, buffers, and cache memory usage in different colors. Finally, the old applet showed various details in a tabular form in its tooltip, which was very nice, if patched to be interactive to allow the user time to take in the detail. The new applet(s) put space between each bar chart and display a wide bar chart for the memory usage. This results in about twice as much space being taken up. There is no information about different memory usage or different CPU usage using colors. Indeed, the CPU charts are all different colors, providing no useful information. The tooltip simply displays the applet title -- no details about the monitored resources. I am attaching the old applet (in case you want to actually run it to see the differences above), screen shots of the old monitor, the new monitor, and the old tooltip.
Created attachment 138431 [details] old screen shot
Created attachment 138432 [details] old tooltip
Created attachment 138433 [details] new screenshot
Thanks Garry for making this report and I agree with what you've stated here. I made a similar report in https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=437124.
*** Bug 437124 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
So it doesn't get lost, I'll add from my 'duplicate' report that there is no apparent ability to configure the update interval in the new System Monitor, in addition to what Garry specified above, including the Memory monitor being too wide when viewed as a single data point bar chart.
It seems like this is a particular use case that isn't fully covered by the new ones, yeah.
additionally: like in the systemloadviewer applet I'd also vote to bring back a preconfigured widget for swap space, which is important, especially on low end devices
Agreed on swap space request. It could just be my distribution's packaging, but it looks like the system monitors (for both CPU and memory) are non-functional with an upgrade to Plasma 5.22.
Reported the aforementioned monitor breakage in https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=440261. Seems to be hardware-specific, so not relevant to this particular bug report.