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.
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
Yeah, I can understand RAM use in
htop, but not intopAlso, the Tree View makes it easy to see which part of <insert name of application> has become a zombie, etc.
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 towardshtop’s text-based interface, which I find highly customizable to my preferences. Plus, htop offers more features and conveniences thantop, making it my go-to choice for now.
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 …
btop has GPU stats in recent versions.
It does? Amazing, hopefully that lands on my systems at some point.
Bottom gang unite
Yeah, +1 for bottom. Love myself a nice ASCII graph
+1 btm squad
Up top
Btop
It’s no burden. Don’t overthink it. Use whatever you like.
Totally, but I do want to know about other people experience tho. So if you don’t mind, share with me my friend.
btop is not only beautiful but contains more info more dense more compact.
htop is my go-to these days. It tells me what I need to know, and it’s just nice to look at.
I’ve given both
htopandbtopa spin, and I have to say that I really preferhtop. It offers a prettier interface and more features thantop, while still feeling less bloated thanbtopto me. So yeah, it’s definitely my go-to choice!Btop is pretty. Htop tells me what I want to know. I prefer htop and it’s my goto.
btop for bling
htop for practical utility
top for minimalism, availability, reliability
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.
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.
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.
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.
-
Why are you using top instead of ps if you’re worried about memory?
-
Containerise it, and you can debug locally
-
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.
-
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
If I was that memory- and cpu-constrained I would be using other tools such as memstat, iostat, and cpustat.
btopbecause pretty colors :3i still need to learn how to use
topwell though, just in case that’s the only option some day. if all else fails i just resort back topsand(p)kill.Now that you mention it, I also have to check out
psjust in case…
htop because pretty colors and graphs.
Or top because it’s like muscle memory now.
I like htop more, but btop has better colors and graphs (imo)
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.
I tend to go with
htoppurely out of habit.btopis better but I simply don’t think to use it.Why do you think that? After this post, I will try out both of them but maybe eventually I will still just use
topout of, same as you bro, habit.I find
htopto be far more legible, the white blocks oftoparen’t for me.btopjust seems a bit too much for my use, so I never caught on to it. I do believebtopto be better however, since the point of these programs is to see detailed statistics about your system and running programs.btopshoves a lot more information into your face. I really only openhtopto 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.I always just grep ps output to find PIDs
the white blocks of
topDid you mean the upper right corner of
top? I also finebtopis overwhelming, too pretty to look at.Yeah, the unicode blocks.
Have you considered putting
alias htop=btop(or equivalent) in your shell profile?I could, but like I said in my other reply
btopis just a bit overkill for my use-case. Also “fixes” like that just seem a bit hacky, and as if I’m trying too hard to use a program. I shouldn’t have to disguise one program as another to be able to use it. That just spells it out plain and clear to me, “I don’t need this program”.
I’m more of a
bottom, if you know what I mean.A fellow Rust enjoyer I see.
vtop is nice too since it still is very readable in small windows.
I’m more of a bottom guy myself
Thanks for the share. Never heard of this until now and the Temperature Sensor and Disk Utilization widgets are awesome.
