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
    34·
    9 months 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

    • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
      4·
      9 months ago

      Yeah, I can understand RAM use in htop, but not in top

      Also, the Tree View makes it easy to see which part of <insert name of application> has become a zombie, etc.

    • DrillingStricken@programming.devOP
      2·
      8 months 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.

    • jlow (he/him)@beehaw.org
      4·
      9 months ago

      Uh, temperatures, that’s nice.

      I’d really like one of these to include GPU stats (I know, there’s nvtop or whatever it’s called), GUI apps can do it (Mission Center and a KDE system monitor widget), but I’ve not seen a CLI program include that …

  • The Doctor@beehaw.orgEnglish
    14·
    8 months ago

    htop is my go-to these days. It tells me what I need to know, and it’s just nice to look at.

    • DrillingStricken@programming.devOP
      4·
      8 months ago

      I’ve given both htop and btop a spin, and I have to say that I really prefer htop. It offers a prettier interface and more features than top, while still feeling less bloated than btop to me. So yeah, it’s definitely my go-to choice!

  • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.ml
    9·
    8 months 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.

  • halfway_neko@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    8·
    8 months ago

    btop because pretty colors :3

    i still need to learn how to use top well though, just in case that’s the only option some day. if all else fails i just resort back to ps and (p)kill.

  • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    8·
    8 months ago

    htop gives me enough info without being too busy or slow, it’s also in basically every OS repo by default so no complicated install.

    The other ones can look awesome, but they’re often harder to get info from quickly due to being too cluttered.

    • Sickday@kbin.run
      2·
      8 months ago

      Thanks for the share. Never heard of this until now and the Temperature Sensor and Disk Utilization widgets are awesome.

  • Bandicoot_Academic@lemmy.one
    5·
    8 months ago

    I like btop because of its ease of use and modern gui. When I open top or even htop it feels like I’m using something designed for a dumb terminal from the 70s. When opening btop it feels like something designed for how computers are used now and not 50 years ago.

    Also to my knowledge It’s the only full system monitor to include GPU monitoring (while other GPU monitors exist they usually only monitor the GPU and not the whole system)

    • DrillingStricken@programming.devOP
      3·
      8 months ago

      Agree with you on the beauty of btop, but sometimes less is more and that’s why I think it’s bloated. When working with the terminal, text-based programs work best on it so htop is much more to my liking due to its minimalist interface.

    • DrillingStricken@programming.devOP
      2·
      9 months ago

      Why do you think that? After this post, I will try out both of them but maybe eventually I will still just use top out of, same as you bro, habit.

      • 🌘 Umbra Temporis 🌒@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        I find htop to be far more legible, the white blocks of top aren’t for me. btop just seems a bit too much for my use, so I never caught on to it. I do believe btop to be better however, since the point of these programs is to see detailed statistics about your system and running programs. btop shoves a lot more information into your face. I really only open htop to find the PID of an app or to find what I need to debloat when I’m in a 1337 h4ck3rm4n mood and trying to make the most minimal system possible.

  • Eevoltic@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    4·
    8 months ago

    I love btop because of how fancy the graphs look and it also shows disk utilisation. I use it pretty much wherever I can. When I want something more simple I use bottom btm --basic and alias it to top