I'm not sure what about using atop is confusing, but I'll admit to printing out and referring to the manpage when I discovered it. That was as much because of the great explanations atop's manual provided for the metrics it could display as it was because I wanted to learn the interactive commands.
Some things about htop that I could see as friendlier:
* Htop scrolls with the arrow keys, while atop uses ^F and ^B.
* Htop displays a reminder for some commonly-used commands at the bottom of the screen (e.g. that you need to press 'F1' for help), whereas in atop you have to remember the commands or look them up by pressing 'h' or '?'.
* Htop displays gauges for system-level activity. I think this is a bad tradeoff, though:
CPU | sys 0% | user 1% | irq 0% | idle 799% | wait 0% |
MEM | tot 7.8G | free 5.7G | cache 735.6M | buff 351.2M | slab 248.1M
is much more useful than
Avg[| 0.2%]
Mem[||||||||||||||||| 1008/7967MB]
There are features of htop that I wish atop had. For example, the toggleable display of threads, the tree view, and integration with strace and lsof. Even without those I find atop more useful, but YMMV.
The killer feature for atop is logging per-process performance data and reviewing it after the fact.
