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.

  • @waigl@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8•1 year ago

    btop for bling

    htop for practical utility

    top for minimalism, availability, reliability

  • @GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
    21•1 year 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•1 year 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.

  • Avid Amoeba
    4•1 year 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.

  • @bloodfart@lemmy.ml
    2•1 year ago

    They’re different tools with different purposes. What you’re asking is like “which do you prefer, hand driver, box/open end wrench, socket wrench or impact driver?”

    Ps and top can be used to very easily figure out and address when processes are screwing up. Atop, htop and btop can be used to directly view stuff hardware reports in real-ish time so you can figure out if a process has stopped being “stepped” across cores, a disk has stopped responding in time or when there’s a lot of network traffic.

    As utilities they operate within fundamentally different scopes, to the point with btop of being extremely zoomed out macro pictures that are helpful when taking in abstract information about a system.

  • @Tekkip20@lemmy.world
    2•1 year ago

    I am a chad htop enjoyer, I find btop and other alternatives too much on the eyes for me personally and HTOP has enough info for me to take a look at in terms of system resources.

    Either that or I just use the regular gnome GUI system monitor lol

  • DigitalDilemma
    7•1 year 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.

  • tutobrezhoneg
    7•1 year ago

    I’m more of a bottom, if you know what I mean.