Stacer [1] used to be the go-to application for spotting problems and keeping a Linux system in good order. This self-described "system optimizer and application monitor" was born as an Electron application and then entirely rewritten in C++ in 2019 to make it lighter and more responsive. One year later, however, development stopped for good. Today, even if you can find binary packages compatible with current versions of your distro, you need to know that Stacer is abandonware that is far out of date.

Luckily, Stacer has a more-than-adequate successor called Nexis [2]. Nexis is a complete rewrite and modernization of Stacer released under the GPL3 license. Unlike its predecessor, Nexis can run on macOS as well as Linux. At the time of writing, the program is built with version 17 of C++ and version 6 of the Qt graphic libraries. All the bugs present in the Stacer sources when it was abandoned were fixed in Nexis shortly after the fork. Nexis also has important features that Stacer had no time to develop. This article will show you how to get started with Nexis.

Installation

Installing Nexis is easy. The Nexis website includes the sources and instructions for how to compile them. The website also provides a macOS disk image for Apple Silicon systems (M1 to M4); DEB packages for the latest stables versions of Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and Debian; and two distribution-independent packages for the other Linux variants (an AppImage and an, almost, standalone executable that requires the Qt6 runtime).

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