Answer : htop it is a terminal app: sudo apt-get install htop htop htop with graph mode ProcMeter3 Look for this system monitor (GUI works with GTK1,2,3): ProcMeter3 An utility which works with LCD devices even. ProcMeter3 GUI on GTK3 Psymon Also once I tried a Psymon . This is not extremely lightweight software and written on Qt (not GTK , and therefore should work better with KDE) though despite to this fact it works well not only with Unity and Gnome, but also in other OS, like FreeBSD, MacOS, Windows etc., because it use great python-psutil Debian package. So look it closer: Nice post about Psymon Psymon project site Psymon You can try xfce4-taskmanager from Xfce or lxtask from LXDE. Neither of them pull any specific dependencies. ndicator-SysMonitor Indicator-SysMonitor does a little, but does it well. Once installed and run, it displays CPU and RAM usage on your top panel. Simple. Download from here Conky One of my personal favourites