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
    0·
    10 months ago

    btop for bling

    htop for practical utility

    top for minimalism, availability, reliability

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
    0·
    10 months 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.

  • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    10 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.

    • Phi@feddit.de
      0·
      10 months ago

      Been a htop guy my whole Linux journey and recently started using btop. I am yet to call my judgement but yeah I feel the same

    • Perhyte@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

      Have you considered putting alias htop=btop (or equivalent) in your shell profile?

    • DrillingStricken@programming.devOP
      0·
      10 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.

      • Spectranox@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        10 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.

  • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
    0·
    10 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

    • DrillingStricken@programming.devOP
      0·
      10 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.

    • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
      0·
      10 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.

  • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world
    0·
    10 months 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.

    • taladar@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      10 months ago

      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.

      Maybe you only use those tools on your desktop but on a cloud server with only 1-2GB of RAM you really don’t want your monitoring to take up some significant percentage of that. Especially when you are debugging things like OOM conditions already.

      • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        10 months ago

        you really don’t want your monitoring to take up some significant percentage of that

        except it doesn’t - both htop and btop use <30 MB

        and if 20MB makes a difference, you don’t need a different top, you need a different machine

        “bloat bad” people are just obnoxious

      • agent_flounder@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        10 months ago

        If I was that memory- and cpu-constrained I would be using other tools such as memstat, iostat, and cpustat.

      • Shareni@programming.dev
        0·
        10 months ago

        1. Why are you using top instead of ps if you’re worried about memory?

        2. Containerise it, and you can debug locally

        3. It’s not what the person you’re replying to is talking about. You’re using a slightly better tool for a specific job, they’re talking about people who won’t use htop/btop on their own machine because BLOAT.

    • jlow (he/him)@beehaw.org
      0·
      10 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 …

  • Eevoltic [she/her]@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    10 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

  • Secret300@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    10 months ago

    Htop what I use cause it’s what I’ve been using. Only really use it to see what process is taking the most CPU usage or RAM usage. System monitors in general though are mostly useless imo