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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.

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[–] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml 42 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] Cyber@feddit.uk 5 points 8 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 has become a zombie, etc.

[–] DrillingStricken@programming.dev 2 points 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.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 26 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] jlow 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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 ...

[–] Overspark@feddit.nl 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

btop has GPU stats in recent versions.

[–] jlow 1 points 8 months ago

It does? Amazing, hopefully that lands on my systems at some point.

[–] drwho 17 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.dev 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] Penguincoder 3 points 8 months ago

Btop is pretty. Htop tells me what I want to know. I prefer htop and it's my goto.

[–] realzombiegeek@infosec.pub 15 points 8 months ago
[–] GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml 15 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

It's no burden. Don't overthink it. Use whatever you like.

[–] DrillingStricken@programming.dev 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Totally, but I do want to know about other people experience tho. So if you don't mind, share with me my friend.

[–] GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml 7 points 8 months ago

btop is not only beautiful but contains more info more dense more compact.

[–] digdilem@lemmy.ml 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 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 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] DrillingStricken@programming.dev 3 points 8 months ago

Now that you mention it, I also have to check out ps just in case...

[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 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.

[–] wick3dr0se@lemmy.ml 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] Sickday@kbin.run 2 points 8 months ago

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

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] FriendBesto@lemmy.ml 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 2 points 8 months ago

Yeah not sure what Jerboa did with my last word. Sense is what I typed.

[–] caseyweederman@lemmy.ca 1 points 8 months ago
[–] SmokeInFog@midwest.social 7 points 8 months ago

btop for system resource monitoring, htop for actually finding and killing processes

[–] UmbraTemporis@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I tend to go with htop purely out of habit. btop is better but I simply don't think to use it.

[–] DrillingStricken@programming.dev 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] UmbraTemporis@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] DrillingStricken@programming.dev 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

the white blocks of top

Did you mean the upper right corner of top? I also fine btop is overwhelming, too pretty to look at.

[–] UmbraTemporis@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Yeah, the unicode blocks.

[–] neurospice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] DrillingStricken@programming.dev 2 points 8 months ago

Never heard of bottom before, I will check it out. Thanks for the suggestion.

[–] rotopenguin@infosec.pub 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] DrillingStricken@programming.dev 1 points 8 months ago

Never heard of it. I will have to check it out later.

[–] Bandicoot_Academic@lemmy.one 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.dev 3 points 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.

[–] Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 5 points 8 months ago

Btop, it's pretty. Htop when I'm lazy or working on a system that's bare bones.

[–] jjlinux@lemmy.ml 4 points 8 months ago

Htop, but only because its what I've always used and have no need to change at the moment.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)
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.

[–] DrillingStricken@programming.dev 3 points 8 months ago

Yeah, that is the reason I use top in the first place. No need for an extra package and I can use it on pretty much every system.

[–] azron@lemmy.ml 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] DrillingStricken@programming.dev 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks for the suggestion! I will try it out.

[–] DibbleDabble@lemmy.ml 3 points 8 months ago

btop, since I can use vi bindings to move around in it.

[–] jlow 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I use btop all the time, used htop before I knew about btop, almost never use top.

[–] DrillingStricken@programming.dev 1 points 8 months ago

I think you still should learn how to use top in case something happens and btop is out of the picture. That is the reason I use and stick with it in the first place.

[–] gerdesj@lemmy.ml 3 points 8 months ago

atop and htop and glances and several others 8)

[–] starman@programming.dev 2 points 8 months ago

btop because it looks cool

[–] bloodfart@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 months 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.

[–] UdeRecife@literature.cafe 2 points 8 months ago

I use both htop and btop—depending on the mood. htop is less prettier, but more reliable. But sometimes I want pretty and I go with btop. top is where I draw the line. It's too nerdy for me.

[–] scratchandgame@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 months ago

top is the standard.