Replace System Monitor shortcut?

General Help
1

When you right-click on the taskbar/panel/dash there is a link for System Monitor. I appreciate this feature but wanted to find an improved version of this app and recently came across Mission Center, which seems to do a better job of grouping open applications together and also includes the ability to monitor the GPU.

I've set Mission Center to a new shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) so I can easily launch it that way but was wondering if there was a way to replace the existing GUI shortcut to launch Mission Center instead of System Monitor.

2

Did you grab Mission Center as a flatpak, snap, or AppImage? A flatpak should've made its own icon while installing, and I believe a snap would've, too. If you're using an appimage, you can make your own .desktop file, though I'm not familiar with the format. There's a tutorial on that here. It may be easier, if you're using the AppImage, to use GearLever. GearLever is available in the software store as a flatpak, and is a tool for managing AppImages.

Links for the convenience of anyone who might have a better grasp than me:

Mission Center (Available as flatpak, snap, or AppImage--can't be built from source on Zorin due to needing newer GTK and libadwaita.

Gear Lever (Even the build instructions only cover flatpak. Man.)

3

I went with the snap, but flatpak is also available from the software center. I don't think an icon is what I'm looking for, just needing to change the System Monitor link to point to Mission Center instead.

4

I don't think it would be easy to swap out existing controls but you could create a desktop shortcut:

"#

Create Mission Center Shortcut

To create a shortcut to launch Mission Center on Ubuntu 22.04, you can follow these steps:

  1. Open a terminal and execute the following command to install Mission Center:
sudo snap install mission-center

Alternatively, if you prefer using Flatpak, you can install Mission Center with:

flatpak install flathub io.missioncenter.MissionCenter
  1. After installation, you can create a desktop shortcut for Mission Center. First, create a .desktop file for Mission Center. You can do this by opening a text editor and adding the following content:
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Mission Center
Exec=snap run mission-center
Icon=mission-center
Type=Application
Categories=Utility;System;

If you installed Mission Center via Flatpak, replace Exec=snap run mission-center with Exec=flatpak run io.missioncenter.MissionCenter .

  1. Save the file with a .desktop extension, for example, mission-center.desktop .

  2. Copy the .desktop file to the ~/Desktop/ directory:

cp mission-center.desktop ~/Desktop/
  1. Right-click the newly created .desktop file on your desktop and select "Allow Launching" to make the shortcut usable.

Once you've completed these steps, you will have a desktop shortcut for Mission Center that you can use to quickly launch the application.

AI-generated answer. Please verify critical facts.

5

You could go to /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/zorin-taskbar@zorinos.com/ and take a Look in the Files if You can replace it. But please be very cautious with this. It is risky and could break the Taskbar.

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6

Thanks, it looks like there is a file in there called appIcons.js where I could swap out the command, but its read-only and won't let me save or replace the file. I'm willing to give this a shot but the smart move is probably to fire up a VM and try it there so I don't end up having to do a full rebuild if something breaks.

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7

To test it in a VM first is a good Idea.

For this open the Terminal and type sudo nano /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/zorin-taskbar@zorinos.com/appIcons.js and then You can change it. After You've made the Change press ctrl+o to save the Change, Enter to confirm and ctrl+x to exit. then I would suggest to make a Reboot.

8

Thanks for those instructions, through my tinkering I went this route:

Open terminal: cd /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/zorin-taskbar@zorinos.com
sudo open appIcons.js
Replace 'gnome-system-monitor' with 'mission-center'
Save
Log out/log in or restart

Looks to be working without issue in the VM so I will do it on my main OS.

I went back and tried nano, but its kind of weird to work in there because its open within the terminal.

Another thing I noted is modifying this file seems like it would be a good method of adding or removing items from the list, or changing their order. I don't know if I would ever bother going that far, but good to know.

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9

Also something I just noticed, if you right-click on the taskbar and select System Monitor and then right-click on the Zorin start icon and select System Monitor, those are two different links. So I will look into that further as I would want both to have the same behavior.

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10

Okay so the other one is going to be:

cd /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/zorin-menu@zorinos.com
sudo open secondaryMenu.js

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