Why do you find yourself opting for btop or htop instead of top? What advantages do these tools offer that make them superior to top in your opinion?

top has served me well, so I’m unsure why I would want to burden my system with the addition of htop or btop. With top, if you wish to terminate a process, simply press ‘k’ and send the signal; it’s that simple. If you’d like to identify the origin of a process, just include the command column.

I often find myself intrigued when encountering comments on posts expressing love for htop/btop. To me, it appears unnecessary or BLOATED!! Please do share your perspectives and help broaden my Linux knowledgebase.

  • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
    21·
    2 years ago

    htop because it’s much more user-friendly than top, has the feature of sending all kinds of signals to processes, has mouse support and it generally looks good. Not a fan of btop at all. Idk how to use it and I don’t like the UI. I personally love the idea of no bloat. It’s just such a nice little philosophy. Sometimes I even want to use a CLI only computer tbh. Though htop weights only a few kilobytes and it has features top doesn’t have so I don’t consider it bloat. I had it on my server as well

    • DrillingStricken@programming.devOP
      1·
      2 years ago

      To be honest, I really prefer btop’s sleek UI. It looks so modern and advanced. But with all its beauty and abundance of information, it can be overwhelming at times or in another words, bloattt. That’s why I personally lean towards htop’s text-based interface, which I find highly customizable to my preferences. Plus, htop offers more features and conveniences than top, making it my go-to choice for now.

  • waigl@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    2 years ago

    btop for bling

    htop for practical utility

    top for minimalism, availability, reliability

      • agent_flounder@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Well, you’re not wrong. I was away from my desktop when I commented and forgot btop looked so fancy.

        For now I still prefer htop because I can see at a glance the stuff I’m most interested in (mem & cpu and process sort).

        I’ll have to play with some of the other suggestions in the post…

        I also am starting to play around with cockpit a little more for remote monitoring.

  • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.ml
    7·
    2 years ago

    htop on our vms and clusters, because it’s in all the repos, it’s fast, it’s configurable by a deployable config file, it’s very clearly laid out and it does everything I need. I definitely would not call it bloated in any way.

    My config includes network and i/o traffic stats, and details cpu load type - this in particular makes iowait very easy to spot when finding out why something’s racking up big sysloads. Plus, it looks very impressive on a machine with 80 cores…

    My brain can’t parse top’s output very well for anything other than looking for the highest cpu process.

    But - ymmv. Everyone has a preference and we have lots of choice, it doesn’t make one thing better or worse than another.

  • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world
    7·
    2 years ago

    I like htop because it has nice CPU graphs and a good tui for navigating. Top is a bit too obtuse for a new user, especially since CPU time is measured per core and not per the entire CPU. Plus I never figured out how turbo boost plays a roll in those percents.

    I haven’t gotten around to messing with btop, but it seems like more of what I like.

    Also fuck the “muh bloat” people. I have an i9 and 32 gigs of ram. I don’t care that a monitor util takes 1/10th of a second longer to launch and uses 1MB more of ram.

  • azron@lemmy.ml
    5·
    2 years ago

    atop, especially because you can take snapshots over time of what the system was doing and use it to backtrack when bad things happen.

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
    4·
    2 years ago
    top

    Because it exists in nearly every environment I might need to check usage. From my desktop, through laptops, lab machines, routers, embedded systems, IoT to cloud, I don’t have to keep the muscle memory of more than one app.

  • BCsven@lemmy.ca
    4·
    2 years ago

    Htop is completly customizable for how the sections of data are displayed. it is a bit convoluted the first time you start, but then it makes