Feature Request: Applet to kill frozen apps

DasJott

I loved that in Cinnamon. There was an applet you could simply click on, then the mouse cursor turned into an X which then again could be clicked on any application to kill it.

I just missed that when Pitivi just froze on my machine. Had to use htop to get rid of the application which took 100% of my CPU.

Anybody here to estimate the effort? 😬

Harvey

ctrl+alt+escape - You'll get a skull and crossbones cursor. Click whatever you want to die with your mouse and 🎉

Effort level 0.5

At least this works on Plasma. No idea about the other DE's.

If that does not work.
sudo eopkg it xkill

You can run xkill from a terminal or set a keybind to run xkill and it will function the same way as my Plasma example.

Effort level 0.6

WetGeek

Harvey ctrl+alt+escape - You'll get a skull and crossbones cursor

And if you try that just to see whether it works on your DE, you can just press escape by itself to exit safely without killing anything.

Somebody should write a book about all these features that nobody knows exist.

Solarmass

Harvey At least this works on Plasma. No idea about the other DE's.

Not on Budgie

Applet to kill frozen apps

and call it AppKiller 🙂

Junglist

Harvey Yep, that's what I've done, it comes in handy sometimes.

brent You could try switching to a TTY - a terminal environment - (eg press ctrl+alt+F1 to switch to TTY1, F2 to TTY2 etc), log in and kill whatever process is bringing the system down, eg by using htop, and switch back to the gui with the same shortcut.

Sometimes tho, the system can get frozen in a way that you can't even switch to the TTY. In that case, the only thing you can do is turn the machine off and on again.

craigtoyoracer

WetGeek

a cheat sheet would be awesome. 🙂

brent

What if the frozen app itself is the operating system?

brent

Junglist Was mostly rhetorical question...I cured my freeze problem 99% simply by giving the OS about 15-20 minutes to get going with NO interference from me.
That said, sometimes clock freezes, then mouse, then all. I've not found a ctrl+alt+___ command yet that took me from the dead desktop to the tty. I know all the hard reboots can't be good, cumulatively, although it barely happens anymore.
I wonder however if my ctrl+alt+F2 I can use to access tty on boot...may actually be different post-launch of operating system? i.e., a different F key? Next time might give it a whirl. Thank you for the info.

Junglist

brent I doesn't matter which F key you use, they simply take you to different instances of the TTY.

I just checked, ctrl-alt-F1 takes me back to the GDM login screen, so it appears to correspond to the gui. I usually use ctrl+alt+F4, but you can also use F5 or some other F key, it doesn't matter.

I don't really have a freezing problem (tho I've had some issues briefly, it was some Nvidia bug I think, it hasn't happened to me in a while), but if you run a lot of windows games via Wine, some of them can lock the system up, and there's been a few times when switching to the TTY saved me from having to poweroff and on.

brent

Junglist thanks for double checking--now you gave me a strategy for when it does happen--but as discussed, rare.
I have no Wine or gamer setup. And I agree in the past Nvidia had a part in it.