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bpytop might be the freaking-coolest way to monitor your Linux system

By - | Views: 52,641

Okay, hear me out. You want to keep an eye on your system for things like RAM use, disk space, processor load and more…but you want something a tiny bit flashy that's still simple enough to run in a terminal window? You need to try out bpytop.

It's a fully featured resource monitor with a "game inspired menu system" and it's genuinely great, I've fallen just a little bit in love with it having it open on my second monitor to keep me informed of how my system is doing. Just look at how gosh-darn awesome it looks:

Thanks to the process selection feature, you can also use it to send "SIGTERM, SIGKILL, SIGINT" to individual processes if you need to get rid of them or if they're stuck. I can see this being incredibly useful. It does practically everything you need and it looks good while doing so.

bpytop is actually a port to Python of another project named bashtop, with the creator suggesting people move on over to bpytop due to it being faster, less resource hungry, mouse support, graphs for memory consumption and more new advanced features.

Their "game inspired" menu is a nice bit of fluff too, giving you a quick and easy way to adjust various settings - very much like you actually would find in a game.

The developer appears to have plans to expand it too with GPU support for temperatures and load, options for resizing all boxes, CPU and mem stats for docker containers (if possible) and the usual optimizations.

As a bit of icing on the cake, you can theme it too.

Check bpytop out on GitHub.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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libgradev Oct 16, 2020
Quoting: SeegrasDon't try this in rxvt.

It looks horrible.

One of the reasons I've switched recently to Kitty term...
slaapliedje Oct 16, 2020
Quoting: Phlebiac
Quoting: slaapliedjeNow to wait 10 years for bpytop to be packaged for enterprise Linux so I can use it. :)

Looks like it's already in the EPEL8 repo? And plenty of others, depending on how you define "packaged for enterprise".
Oh, I meant mostly that I figured it'd pop up in EPEL8, but anyone working with a huge amount of stuff is not going to be on 8 yet. Slow moving this boat is... I mean some companies are convinced that their stuff will break if they move off of Cent5, so there is that. Fortunately I don't work for one of those companies. But upgrading around does take it's sweet time.

Of note, RHEL8 is actually not terrible as a desktop! Though I haven't tried Steam or anything on it yet (I got a license to use their KB, so figured I may as well install it on my laptop to have a play.)
Philadelphus Oct 17, 2020
The phrase "game inspired menu system" got me thinking about how advanced games can be in some areas, and how non-gaming software could perhaps stand to learn a thing or two from them. Like, usability is a very important consideration for a game; if it's hard enough to use, people won't play it, because they're playing it to have fun, not because an employer is forcing them to (well, people will probably just mod it to be easier if the gameplay is fun enough otherwise, but you get the idea). Think of a game you like with a really fluid interface, and imagine if the software you use for work or productivity were that easy to use. (This is not to say all productivity software is bad, it's just a hypothetical what-if. )

Quoting: minidouNow it just needs to be rewritten in rust.
Behold, ytop. (Not actually related as far as I know, just a similar system-resource terminal display program.)

I was actually showing off ytop (and a bunch of other useful utilities written in Rust ) to some of my PhD student colleagues in the natural sciences this week, and one of them suggested that the best use for this kind of utility is to have it running on your screen in the background when a journalist is interviewing you for a science story so the general public knows you're doing work.


Last edited by Philadelphus on 17 October 2020 at 9:16 am UTC
gilboa Oct 18, 2020
Quoting: Phlebiac
Quoting: slaapliedjeNow to wait 10 years for bpytop to be packaged for enterprise Linux so I can use it. :)

Looks like it's already in the EPEL8 repo? And plenty of others, depending on how you define "packaged for enterprise".

I can confirm its already EPEL8 and being updated regularly. I've been using it for a while on CentOS 8 / oVirt.

- Gilboa


Last edited by gilboa on 18 October 2020 at 12:34 pm UTC
14 Oct 19, 2020
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I started using bashtop about a year ago or a little less. Hmm... should I switch now or wait 'til Arch promotes it to the Community repo?
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