Jack Wallen / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET
Key takeaways
System performance is key to getting the most out of Linux.
There are several command line and GUI tools to make this task easy.
Here you'll learn about htop, glances, Mission Center, and more apps.
Linux users are notorious for wanting to know as much information as they can about their systems and how they run. There are even apps and widgets (such as Conky) that can be installed and configured to display such information right on the desktop.
Also: 5 lightweight Linux distributions that will bring your old PC back to life
If you want to monitor system performance on your Linux desktop, what apps should you use? Well, there are several, but not all of them are created equal. There are GUI apps and command-line apps, each of which has its pros and cons. I'm going to introduce you to the apps I prefer for this task -- some GUI, some command-line based.
1. htop
For the longest time, top was my tool of choice. Eventually, however, I realized that top could be a bit frustrating to use and didn't include features like color or mouse interaction. For those features, I turn to htop, which is one of the best command-line–based system monitoring tools for Linux.
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