A ping is one of the most basic network diagnostic tools out there. Ping tests the connectivity between two nodes or devices. While not particularly important for day-to-day users, ping checks offer a very approachable way to test whether a website is up and live on a network.

Usually, pinging or ping tests are done directly from the command line, but there's an arguably easier way (even though maybe not as fast) and that's with the help of a desktop app.

Echo is one such application, an app that allows you to ping websites. What's it got going for it? Well, it's free and open-source and it can be installed on most modern Linux distros directly from Flathub.

Since I'm a general GNOME user, I'm also happy that this is an app that adheres to the principles of the GNOME Code of Conduct. It looks rather nice and at home on GNOME desktops, unsurprisingly since this is an GTK4 and Libadwaita app.

Clearly, Echo is not a feature-packed network manager with tons of features and functions. There are a couple of parameters you can configure namely the number of pings, the interval between each packet, the timeout period, and that's pretty much it.

The ping results are displayed on a rather simplistic results page. Don't expect many details, though. The results include the minimum, maximum, and average response times, the number of packets sent and received, as well as the percentage of packet loss (if there is any).

Upon first using the app, you might encounter a somewhat disconcerting error message that states "Insufficient permissions." If that's the case, you'll have to run the following terminal commands in succession. First, run "echo 'net.ipv4.ping_group_range = 0 2147483647' | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf" and then "sudo sysctl -p."