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…
It’s not a process monitor, really, but to me the AWS Lightsail monitor tab feels like this. The “sustainable” line hits me right in the OCD to keep me grinding on cpu usage of the workload to keep extra spend at zero.
haha, triple simultaneous posts.... but that doom kill game isn't really the same as gamifying resource management. I would really want to see a gamified process monitor as well.
The project simply has "game inspired menu system". OP, probably unaware for what gamify truly means, used this term. That said a gamified system monitor will've been quite funny project to see. "Achievement unlocked: Run out of memory!"
The poster appears to be Indian from their HN profile. How about we extend some grace for a slight misunderstanding of the nuances of a term that isn't particularly common in day to day discussions?
I see your point, but I think the anger comes from the fact that
1. the title was unneccessarily editorialized,
2. the word gamified is used wrong here, and
3. There was never any good reason to add the word gamified to the title, other than adding a buzzword.
The feedback people give is probably a bit harsh, but I find it understandable. If you don’t know what a term means, don’t use it - especially not if it’s completely unnecessary as in this case.
I kind of avoided it too, htop, bmon, iotop and nvidia-smi worked fine as it was. But eventually came across it for the Nth time and finally tried it out, it's basically all of them in one, with some nicer graphs and customization. Do I require it to do my job? No, but with it I need 3-4 tmux panes less to see the same info. Also does most of the stuff I used htop for, sorting by different things, filtering by letters and easy to kill the currently selected process.
If a text-mode process monitor is larger than about 200 KiB, then it sounds bloated to me. If it's loaded with tons of features, then my upper limit is 1 MiB.
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 :)
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.
And I really dislike them. The nice thing about CLI is that you can compose them quite easily. You can compose your own report giving you what you want and none of what you don’t want.
And most of those TUI are badly designed in terms of configurability. Especially the ise of colors and “effects”.
Lately? Tiling window managers with open terminals running TUI programs have been the focal point in r/unixporn since ever. All looking like poor imitations of Oberon system which actually combined text/graphical interfaces.
I am all in favour of better TUIs. Omarchy unfortunately does not interest me ever since DHH decided to take more control of the ruby-ecosystem via shopify.
Which has no relation to the word gamified. So the editorialized title is misleading.
Editorialized here simply means applying editor-level changes to the title of the website to express an opinion. No deceit is implied. It is against HN guidelines unless the title is unclear or does not fit.
That isn't what gamified means, and one should not be using such a term without knowing what it means. When in doubt, stick to simpler descriptions. Hence calling it poorly editorialized.
Press F2 to go to setup, then go to "Meters" on the left. Under "Available Meters" you should see "GPU usage", which can be added to the status meters at the top. Available options for format are "Bar", "Text", "Graph", and "LED".
I'm using 3.4.1, so it's possible you have an older version that doesn't have it.
I gave up on heavily customizing the UI after a couple of top variants (where I would lose said customizations for a variety of reasons) over the years so I run a fairly vanilla config: I like both the look and the information density of btop over htop out of the box.
btop is good, I like 'glances' the best though because like 'atop' it actually highlights whatever problem is most likely to be causing lag at the moment, and it breaks out docker containers into a separate section and labels them properly.
btop is more colorful and a bit prettier. It has different color themes and it’s easy to open and close different views (network, memory, system processes, storage, etc). Not sure if there’s any real functional advantage though.
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.
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
This is exactly my go to. Monitoring and visualization in Btop and killing the process in htop. It makes it so much easier searching a process with a shortcut instead of navigating the TUI in btop to search
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.
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.
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
https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/
This is not that, but… honestly I don't think I want a game-menu-UIfied top either. Most games' UI is barely tolerable…
(Ed.: looks like it's just poor titling in the HN submission)
btop: A monitor of resources
As per HN guidelines [0] -
> Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
1. the title was unneccessarily editorialized, 2. the word gamified is used wrong here, and 3. There was never any good reason to add the word gamified to the title, other than adding a buzzword.
The feedback people give is probably a bit harsh, but I find it understandable. If you don’t know what a term means, don’t use it - especially not if it’s completely unnecessary as in this case.
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 kind of avoided it too, htop, bmon, iotop and nvidia-smi worked fine as it was. But eventually came across it for the Nth time and finally tried it out, it's basically all of them in one, with some nicer graphs and customization. Do I require it to do my job? No, but with it I need 3-4 tmux panes less to see the same info. Also does most of the stuff I used htop for, sorting by different things, filtering by letters and easy to kill the currently selected process.
And most of those TUI are badly designed in terms of configurability. Especially the ise of colors and “effects”.
Also fsdoom: https://dos.itch.io/fsdoom
"Editorialized" implied deceit was intended. It looks to me like the submitter was trying to be descriptive.
The very first item in the feature list is
> Easy to use, with a game inspired menu system.
Editorialized here simply means applying editor-level changes to the title of the website to express an opinion. No deceit is implied. It is against HN guidelines unless the title is unclear or does not fit.
that said a enjoy looking at code for projects that are multi os so cheers for op.
It was the submitter's opinion that "gamified" was an accurate description for this page instead of using the actual title of the page.
So while "editorialized" is a little formal, it is correct.
Reporting on controversial issues is often editorialized, which may be where your feeling that it relates to deceit is coming from.
That's all.
They could have described it as "game-like design" or something else.
"Poorly described" would be correct. "Editorialized" does not mean what you think it means. See my previous comment.
I'm using 3.4.1, so it's possible you have an older version that doesn't have it.
btop in contrast, currently shows me: GPU utilization (graph/historic+current), clock speed, power-state, power usage, encoding/decoding utilization, VRAM frequency, VRAM bandwidth utilization (graph+current) + VRAM total/free usage and finally the current transmit/receive rate to/from VRAM.
- per physical core clock next to the per core temperature and usage
- multiple top subwindows that can each be sorted by different things (it's nice to see who's hogging CPU, memory, and GPU)
- more UPS / battery support, namely hooks into power usage
I have used htop forever, but would be happy to hear of a compelling reason to switch.
I have a few more listed + notes on them here: https://docs.sweeting.me/s/system-monitoring-tools#All-in-on...
Is btop basically just extending where it can run?
- CPU usage graph (global and per cpu)
- CPU temp + graph
- GPU usage
- Memory graphs
- Disks space infos + real-time IO
- Network graph, one for each network device, upload/download stats since opening the app
- Per program cpu graph, memory graph
You should try it.
Anyone remember top? I was so happy to switch to htop that had colors!
https://xkcd.com/1053/
btop: done
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
I bet the Rust boys are contemplating a rewrite already.