Hello again,
I sent a suggestion to the Fedora packager to drop the
"--disable-modern-top" configuration in the distribution.
(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1499410) It would be nice
to make a useful tool even better. In a comment, he replied that
while he was fine with the colors and other changes, he didn't feel
too sure about the forest view by default.
As this was also my own initial reaction, I thought I could bring it
up here. Is it really such a good idea to use forest view by default?
The clearly most common and obvious use of "top" in my experience is
to show the most resource hungry processes. In forest view, without
additional flags, you don't see this. Personally, I find the forest
view useful only very occasionally. I suspect that is true for most
other users too.
I read in the git comment that a reason for this was to expose users
to more of the features of top. While I can see the point in this, I
feel a bit worried you are taking away the most important feature in
the process. While I believe more users would use bars to use visible
memory, color display, et.al. if they were aware of the features, I
guess the forest view would still be a special case use only.
Was there some more reasoning behind the forest view by default than
can be seen in the git comment? Have you had any feedback yet from
other distributions how this particular change has been received?
I, and I believe the Fedora packager, are curious to know more! :-)
