Every other monitor hands you an X-ray and says "good luck." rockbottom is the doctor who actually tells you what's wrong — in one sentence, and points at the process doing it.
↓ this is a live rb — it's running right now. poke it.
A dashboard is twelve gauges and a shrug. rockbottom employs, at great personal expense, a little guy whose entire job is to stare at all that garbage, turn to you, and deliver exactly one (1) sentence — the same differential diagnosis a good SRE does at a glance, except it never sleeps and it isn't tired of you.
The verdict is color-coded, so even if you cannot read — no judgment, you clearly got this far on vibes and shape-recognition — the color tells you everything:
And the process doing the crime gets a fat red », so you don't walk the list whispering "is it you?? is it YOU???" It's Chrome. It's always Chrome. htop knew and said nothing, because htop is a coward.
| top | htop | btop | nvtop | rockbottom | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain-english verdict | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| names the culprit process | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| gpu monitoring built in | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| per-user rollup + who is filling the disk | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| single static binary | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| zero dependencies | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| reads them for you | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
The installer grabs the right static binary for Linux x86_64/arm64 or Apple Silicon, checks its SHA-256, and drops rb in ~/.local/bin.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/1ay1/rockbottom/master/install.sh | sh
A terminal system monitor for Linux and macOS. Instead of a wall of numbers like htop or top, it reads them and tells you what's actually wrong in one plain-English, color-coded sentence — and points at the exact process responsible.
htop and btop display metrics and leave you to interpret them. rockbottom runs a differential diagnosis every tick and delivers a single verdict — calm, busy, stressed, or critical — and names the culprit. It also replaces nvtop for GPU monitoring, ships as one static binary with zero dependencies, and paints its first frame in about 7 milliseconds.
Run curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/1ay1/rockbottom/master/install.sh | sh. It downloads the correct static binary for Linux x86_64/arm64 or Apple Silicon, verifies its SHA-256, and installs rb to ~/.local/bin. No build step, no package manager, no shared libraries.
No. It's fully event-driven, reads files instead of forking subprocesses on the hot path, and sits at near-zero idle CPU. It will not spin your fans just to tell you nothing is wrong.
Linux on x86_64 and arm64 (fully static musl binaries), and macOS on Apple Silicon (native arm64). Android via Termux too. No Windows build yet.