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.

  • @[email protected]
    48•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

    • SayCyberOnceMoreEnglish
      6•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.

    • @[email protected]OP
      2•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.

    • @[email protected]OP
      4•10 months ago

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

  • @waiglEnglish
    16•10 months ago

    btop for bling

    htop for practical utility

    top for minimalism, availability, reliability

  • DigitalDilemma
    13•10 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.

  • @[email protected]English
    13•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.

  • @fuckwit_mcbumcrumble
    12•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.

    • @[email protected]
      10•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.

      • @agent_flounderEnglish
        4•10 months ago

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

      • @[email protected]
        4•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.

      • Eager EagleEnglish
        4•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

  • @[email protected]
    12•10 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.

  • @agent_flounderEnglish
    11•10 months ago

    htop because pretty colors and graphs.

    Or top because it’s like muscle memory now.

      • @agent_flounderEnglish
        1•10 months ago

        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.

  • tutobrezhoneg
    9•10 months ago

    I’m more of a bottom, if you know what I mean.

    • Ark-5
      1•10 months ago

      A fellow Rust enjoyer I see.

      vtop is nice too since it still is very readable in small windows.

  • SpectranoxEnglish
    8•10 months ago

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

    • @[email protected]OP
      4•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.

      • SpectranoxEnglish
        2•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.

    • PerhyteEnglish
      2•10 months ago

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

      • SpectranoxEnglish
        1•10 months ago

        I could, but like I said in my other reply btop is 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”.

    • Sickday
      2•10 months ago

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

  • youmaynotknow
    8•10 months ago

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