this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34255100

Thought I'd create a distinct thread from the previous one asking about daily use, because I really do want to hear more on people's pain points. Great to know people are generally sounding pretty positive in those posts who recently switched, but want to know your difficulties as well! This way old and new users can share their thoughts, hopefully to inspire a respectful discussion.

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[–] biofaust@lemmy.world 28 points 6 days ago (7 children)

I miss a task manager-like shortcut to come out to the desktop and easily kill processes freezing the PC.

[–] Hubi@feddit.org 44 points 6 days ago (2 children)

At least KDE has a shortcut in the Window Management settings that kills any window you want with a single click. You just press the key combination (Meta+Ctrl+Esc by default) and your cursor turns into a skull. Then just left click the frozen window and it closes instantly. Never had it fail, you can even kill your Desktop if you miss lol

[–] mech@feddit.org 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] Hubi@feddit.org 6 points 6 days ago

You're welcome, it's a pretty handy feature.

[–] PabloSexcrowbar@piefed.social 6 points 6 days ago

FYI, on other DE's you can just bind xkill to whatever shorcut you want. I tried it recently and it works just fine on Wayland.

[–] kiol@discuss.online 16 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Totally. I've keybound xkill or similar to recreate that experience.

[–] biofaust@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Correct me if I am wrong, if I switch away from a fullscreen application, I won't have it available to be terminated using xkill, right?

[–] kiol@discuss.online 4 points 6 days ago

In that case you would switch back.... my thought is to add xkill or similar to a keybinding so it can be called without switching away from the thing.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 6 days ago

And knowing what's actually eating cpu cycles. Sometimes 4 threads are at 25% but usage should be like 4-5% per thread.

[–] drkt@scribe.disroot.org 6 points 6 days ago (2 children)

A few select games, Notably Watch Dogs 2 and Fallout: New Vegas, probably because of Proton bugs, occasionally freeze my (Debian+i3wm) desktop. My computer is not frozen, but my desktop session is. I can take my smartphone and SSH into my desktop to kill the game's process (or Steam, which will take the game with it when it dies).

I've come to enjoy this process because I feel like some kinda movie hacker.

[–] Baggie@lemmy.zip 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

How much ram you hauling? I've had similar issues when voices of the void sprung a memory leak in an earlier build, completely froze my desktop until I nuked it.

[–] drkt@scribe.disroot.org 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

48G but that's not it. I have plenty left over whenever it happens, and running out of memory has never frozen my desktop.

[–] Baggie@lemmy.zip 2 points 5 days ago

Shit that's crazy. I guess the syslog might help but I know it won't give you wine/proton logs, and I've not worked out how to get at those myself yet.

[–] Durandal@lemmy.today 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

You should be able to switch tty to access the system directly from the pc. If you're unaware... ctrl alt f3 will switch to another terminal where you can login and access things. Generally your default sessions is in f2 (ymmv) so ctrl alt f2 should return you to your desktop where you left off once you nuke the offending pid.

[–] drkt@scribe.disroot.org 3 points 6 days ago

Yes, I am aware, but my keyboard can't do that shortcut

PSA Don't buy a 60% keyboard for use with Linux...

[–] msage@programming.dev 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

You can always come out of everything to a separate terminal, not sure how many users actually know that.

It's not always helpful or even very friendly, but it can save butts.

Ctrl + Alt + F1 or ...F6, sometimes even up to F8. Usually desktop is at F2. Sometimes it's not. But you can check them any time.

[–] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 2 points 5 days ago

There was one time years ago I was working on some unholy mess of mods for Transport Fever and the game kept crashing and bringing the whole X session down with it, and instead of just rebooting like a sane person I instead started a new X session on a new terminal session. I think I got up to 4 or 5 dead x sessions before I finally finished sorting out my mods and rebooted to clean it all up

[–] Durandal@lemmy.today 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

IDK what desktop environment you're using... or your specific scenario... but most DE should have something like that. KDE and Gnome have a version of "system monitor" which will work very much like task manager on windows.

https://apps.kde.org/plasma-systemmonitor/

https://apps.gnome.org/SystemMonitor/

Generally there are preinstalled and already assigned a hotkey.

[–] biofaust@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] Durandal@lemmy.today 2 points 6 days ago

I believe cinnamon uses gnome system monitor by default so there should be a way to set a custom hotkey for it in settings.

I use Mission Center because I'm someone who prefers a GUI. Maybe that will help some here. :)