this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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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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[–] bloodfart@lemmy.ml 3 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.