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.

  • Tekkip20@lemmy.world
    1·
    6 months 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

  • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
    1·
    7 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.

  • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    7 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.

  • ITeeTechMonkey@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    I run Tilix with split terminals and always have one with htop running. It is so satisfying finding a troublesome process and killing it in htop.

    Looking at you hanged ssh sessions…

  • JoeKrogan@lemmy.world
    1·
    7 months ago

    I use btop in tmux on my server but on the desktop I run htop in a dropdown terminal when I need to keep am eye on things

    As to the why it depends on the use case but on my server I can monitor all disks and networks utilization by interface in addition to processor and memory usage with btop.

    Htop is easier to parse due to the colors but I’ll still use top if on a remove server to check something in work.

  • The Doctor@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    7 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
      0·
      7 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!