new-version Discussion

[Adam-Cosner]

Hello! This will be the primary method of communication for the new-version branch while it is in development

[Adam-Cosner]

Welcome to the 1.0 release of Observatory!
This project will improve upon the old version by doing the following:

• No more reliance on building nvtop from source instead using a direct Rust backend
• Better packaging
  • optionally using Podman or Docker in the future for the daemon if possible?
  • Using flatpak for distributing Observatory itself
  • (eventual) support for installing the monitor daemon directly from Observatory's GUI
• Allow to run in "headless" mode where the monitoring daemon is running on another computer and prompting the user to connect via IP if it's not installed
• Easy configuration of update intervals for different metrics using /etc/monitord/config.toml
• Cross platform resource gathering capability (Windows, macOS, and Linux) (partially completed)

[fulalas]

My 2 cents:

Build:

1. don't make monitord a service. It makes no sense to have a service running all the time even when the user is not using observatory. Instead, load monitord only when observatory is running.
2. don't assume the distro has systemd (e.g. systemctl calls in observatory and monitord justfile).
3. don't use hardcoded paths (e.g. /usr/local/bin/ in monitord justfile).

UX:

1. given a section (CPU, GPU, Network, etc), if there's only one tab, make it selected by default. Example: I have only one GPU and I still have to click on it to see the graph and other information. We can go even further and select the one that makes more sense in the context, for instance although I have an ethernet adapter, I'm actually connected over wifi, so observatory should know that and select my wifi card automatically.
2. make the graphs render in the whole space available. At the moment I need to increase observatory window size to see the graphs using all the space available, otherwise I would have a big gap at the bottom

For UI inspiration, I recommend taking a look at https://gitlab.com/mission-center-devs/mission-center

Cheers

[Adam-Cosner]

The reason monitord is a service is to support remote device monitoring. I'm gonna be adding functionality to pause the service when no clients are connected.

I'll be adding support for other init systems soon as well.

The tab selection is a good idea

I initially chose to have the graphs render as a square because mission center's graphs frustrated me, but I guess I can just have it stretched