Oh very neat, that works great! A much better solution.

I know you’re looking for a desktop solution, but here’s something that you can try in case you can’t find one – I’m betting that having a solution is better than having none!

So I just had a quick muck around:

• You can use pgrep to detect if a process with a given name is running
• You can use notify-send (part of the libnotify-bin package) to publish a configurable desktop notification
• You can drop it into a cron job to run it automatically on a schedule

As a test, the following command will look for a process called syncthing and send a desktop notification if it can’t find it:

pgrep syncthing || notify-send "Syncthing is not running"

To set up a cron job:

1. open a terminal
2. run sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y libnotify-bin to install the app that will let you send desktop notifications
3. open the editor with crontab -e (if you need to pick an editor, nano will probably be your best bet, it’s easiest to use)
4. in the editor, add the following line to the end of the file: 0 * * * * pgrep syncthing || notify-send "Syncthing is not running"
   • The 0 * * * * sets up the schedule (on the 0th minute of every hour, every day of the month, every month, on every day of the week)
   • Everything after that is the command to run
5. save and quit

If you ever want to get rid of it, just open the cron file again (crontab -e) and remove the line.

Good luck, I hope you find what you’re looking for!

[edit] added step (2) to install libnotify-bin in case you don’t have it already.

Hello! I don’t know of a desktop watchdog application that will do this for you, but you may be able to achieve this with a simple cron job. Probably just an hourly crontab entry that looks for a running process with the right name, and uses something like notify-send to send an alert if it’s not found. I’ll jump on the computer and have a quick play, though I run gnome not plasma so I don’t know how well it will translate.