Sorry for even asking

top immediately upon starting:

Well it does make sense that the CPU has to work a bit when loading a new program.

All four cores at 100%? We don't see that kind of spike when we open some other application right? Is it the experience of everyone? Or am I wrong in this?
- That first data point is simply invalid. Ignore it. Monitoring software usually report some kind of statistic (mean, median, min/max, etc) taken from measurements over a period of time instead of the instantaneous value when the report is updated. But they can't do that for the first data point when the application is launched because there's no time period over which to measure it.
- Unless bottlenecked somewhere else, we would want to see 100 % with everything that takes more than some milliseconds.
- I paid for all the cores, I'm gonna use all the cores!
- Top revs the engine as a test /s
- Absolutely. That's why race to idle is a thing. As soon as the CPU is fed cycles it races to complete the task as quickly as possible. When the program first launches and starts monitoring the only thing it knows is that it was just doing something. It hasn't had a change to not do something. It's now completed its race and now it's able to relax for a second and idle.
- It's going to be an artifact of the data collection method. The sample size is extremely small and taken during the period where top has never stopped running.
- I mean, maybe. Imagine averaging the usage over a single instruction cycle. Whatever ran that instruction is using 100% of the processor for that time period.

TOP averages out readings from the last few seconds. If there aren't enough samples the displayed values can be… off

btop ftw

btop is nice and I use it sometimes; but htop, my beloved, doesn't complain about the screen size being too small. And it's more visual for me anyways.
- yeah htop is useful on a phone
  btw to format inline code blocks, put a single backtick on each side of the code, like this: btop.
glances Btw
btm ftw
It runs on Windows

Same happens opening Windows Task Manager, my older server rig used to lock up frequently, stalling programs like Home Assistant, and the only thing I had to do to fix it was remote in and open Task Manager. CPU usage dropped to between 70% and 30%.

This, incidentally, was why I was convinced I needed better hardware for a dedicated Proxmox rig. I was very wrong. With Windows, I can barely run three services (HA, AgentDVR, Emby) alongside their stupid NTFS scan and antivirus. With Proxmox I can run 20 services with no issue. CPU is usually 60%-70% with everything.

I'm running like 18 machines inside of hyper-v and don't have that problem. Were you using a consumer version of windows or something?
- Yes aha, Windows 10 Home, 22H2 update. Only Windows OS I owned and this was before I tried Linux

Same, but if you haven't aliased top to btm --battery you're not really living

You guys hate GUI, don't you?

- Sometimes you have a runaway process sucking up another gigabyte of your swap every second and you don't have a chance in hell of bringing up some kind of system management gui
- sometimes you're in terninal anyway
  Said confidently Fully Casual Personal Computational Machine Operator
No, but I don't see the value in using the GUI for something that can be gotten with less complexity and overhead.
You are allowed to use GUI and CLI tools
You're dyslexic, aren't you?
- Yes
  Ho y te?