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btop: A monitor of resources

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I’m a btop user how is it gamified? If by “gamified” thy mean “looks like something you would see in a video game (or movie)” then yeah tha tracks but that’s not what “gamified” typically means…

"Linux binaries for each architecture are statically linked with musl". Love to see this! The binary is 2.6MB and runs great.

I don't know if this will replace htop for me. The main feature seems to be 24 bit color and some aggressive styling. I'm too old fashioned for that.

i dont think they could have possibly chosen a word to make me want to use it less than gamified.

I like btop but as someone who keeps their config files under source control it's a bit annoying that anything you do in the application results in config file changes.

I've been searching for something that would be able to show me all the stats I care about (cpu, memory, disk and network usage) on a single screen, and btop so far has been quite good at this role. It has a bit weird controls to my taste, but reading the manual works I guess :)

What about btop is gamified?

btop is my default 'top' these days, has everything htop/top provides plus it shows the usage of GPUs.

I recently found out https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom#readme (cargo install bottom; executable btm), it's a pretty great improvement over htop I was using before.

I really like the new wave of TUI aesthetic that's been worming its way into Linux user interfaces lately. Check out Omarchy's desktop distro if you want more of that aesthetic throughout your OS, it does a good job if that's the look and feel you want.

You get this for free if you upgrade to Debian 12. It's in the repos.

Anyone have strong feelings on htop, btop, bottom, etc?

I have used htop forever, but would be happy to hear of a compelling reason to switch.

I prefer [bottom](https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom)

This is quite cool, but I do have to nitpick the weird titlebars on the sections. For some reason the top lines bend down to meet the titles and create clutter, in an already cluttered interface.

Does anyone know the difference? I have been using htop since about 20 years.

Is btop basically just extending where it can run?

btop is my default resources monitor and I really like it, but calling it "gamified"?? you are tracking memory and cpu usage, it doesn't have to be fun

It’s pretty, but I’m a die hard htop fan. Watching and killing processes just doesn’t seem as simple in btop.

> modern alternative

Anyone remember top? I was so happy to switch to htop that had colors!

Waiting for neobtop++ to output a full GUI system monitor using sixels.

My favorite part about btop is how smooth the color gradient is from the top of the process list to the bottom. Soooo smooooth…

I wouldn’t call it “gamified” but I do love btop. the one thing missing for me is GPU usage on MacOS (I use asitop for that)

I appreciate that people use the new features in C++23, but I don't like that what's supposed to be a very basic system utility relies on compilers not available except in the newest of distributions. I mean, sure, you can also download and build a modern C++ compiler, but I would have swallowed my pride and written it using somewhat older C++. I maintain a GPU-related C++ library which assumes C++11 and no later - even if C++17 constexpr goodness would have made some of it easier to write.

Windows Task Manager is already gamified. You find the process you want to kill, then it starts jumping around and you can't click it. You try to find it by typing, but there are 20 other processes with that name that are selected first. So fun.

Not the same kind of monitor tool exactly, but, I keep finding dstat hard to leave behind. Because I can see the past there! So many of these monitors have one or two or three over time graphs, but most of the information is ephemeral, only shows right now. But I really want to see network use, disk use, paging, context switching/interrupts over time!

There is also Below. Which has a much more htop/btop like interface than dstat. Below records system info over time, and allows time travel! However, it's not as convenient as dstat, not at a glance, as one has to to scrub through time. But it is pretty impressive system monitoring, great for what it is! It's per-process pressure metrics are also utterly unbeatable. The way it rolls up cgroups is also stellar. https://github.com/facebookincubator/below

My goodness, it's written in a non-memory safe language! /s

I bet the Rust boys are contemplating a rewrite already.