Classic command-line utilities are considered the go-to tools for system administration, but some powerful graphical tools also are available for monitoring and optimizing a Linux system. One of those tools is Stacer, which lives on GitHub [1]. Sourceforge [2] also offers sources for compiling, as well as a DEB packages for 32- and 64-bit systems and an AppImage for 64-bit machines. In this article, I take a close look at the Stacer AppImage version. (See the box titled "AppImage" for more on the AppImage format.)

What Is Stacer?

Stacer was designed for Ubuntu but works with any distribution, with a couple of restrictions. The application, created by GitHub developers, is based on the Electron framework [4] and can be used for building cross-platform apps on the basis of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Skype for Linux and the Atom editor, Franz messenger, and Darktable image processing tool are some of the better known representatives of the framework.

After downloading the AppImage, I distributed it to various virtual machines running Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Mageia, Manjaro, Apricity OS, and openSUSE and tried a static installation with Siduction (Debian Unstable). Stacer ran on all the distributions tested. On systems with KDE Plasma desktop, however, you need to launch Stacer as root because of a kdesu authorization error.

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