pgrep and pkill -9 when those work for unresponsive programs
KDE's System Monitor when using the above doesn't work
For looking cool/viewing running programs: btop
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
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I just use "ps aux" . Like one of the big boys.
Mission control, its way easier to see what's going on and kill it when necessary
Used to top, now I btop
Used to top, now I bottom
I thought this was implied? /s
Yes, htop. And occasionally I'm in the mood for btop.
+1 for btop
When you want people to think you are mad hax. Btop. It isn't the most succinct display. But damn it's purdy.
htop scales better on small terminal windows, but btop is prettier and more useful if I dedicate a whole monitor to it.
I'm probably older than most of you, and I'm not going for the "get off my lawn" answer like the rest of you. Mission center - because graphical user interfaces add value
I prefer Resources but I like Mission Center as well. Plasma's System Monitor has come a long way as well.
Im all for graphical if its functional, and doesn't change visually with updates
Glances
It shows you all the usual stuff, but as a bonus, you’ll also get disk I/O and temperature sensors.
If you’re maxing out your CPU, you’ll know which application is doing it and how hot the CPU is.
System monitor
Usually have tmux split into panes with htop, nmon and nload running whilst I'm doing whatever in the final quadrant
It's interesting to watch what happens on my NAS when I run a backup, to see that the CPU, network and disks don't do what you think they'll do when they do whatever they're doing
I usually only use htop to monitor resource usage. I mostly kill stuff with killall or the good old ps aux | grep ... kill combo.
s/killall/pkill/
btm gang
finally representation matters
+1 for btm
Idk, something about its name really resonates with me 🤣
If I want to watch resource usage over time, KDE Plasma's System Monitor does the job. I like that I can customize its panels and graph data from just about any sensor in the system.
For anything else, it's usually command line tools like ps, pgrep, kill, and occasionally plain old top.
top
I use htop over SSH, otherwise any DE I'm using usually provides one and I use that.
Well, I was going to say GNOME's System Monitor which has always been the default GUI task manager on my distro, but it's been getting steadily more and more GNOME-ified with every revision and frankly, I hate how it looks now.
Might be time to shop for an alternative.
Edit +44 mins: So, the immediate alternatives all have other things I don't like about them, but an older version of GNOME System Monitor will still install and run, so I guess I'll be using that for now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The GNOME task manager is getting updated to Resources. Is this the one you speak of?
No. My distro still provides the latest release of the original GNOME system monitor.
As time has gone on, GNOME have enforced more and more of their own look and feel, completely ignoring any styling that might be provided by other window managers. Some of those might even be using older GTK libraries, but that doesn't matter.
Basically if you run a modern GNOME app under KDE, MATE, Xfce, etc., it's going to look like a GNOME app regardless of what the other windows look like. Very Henry Ford.
The system monitor is no different. The new version works but the earlier version I found and installed also works fine and fits in. I suspect it's GTK3 (old) versus GTK4 (new), but I can't confirm. It'll be something like that.
The folks responsible for Linux Mint started the XApps project of GNOME forks to roll back some of GNOME's nonsense, but I guess they haven't got around to forking the system monitor yet.
... and I've looked at both Resources and Mission Centre. Neither are to my taste (and are both Flatpaks).
Have you tried MATE System Monitor? It's a fork of the old GNOME System Monitor from GNOME 2.
That was the first one I tried, but it's a fork from too far back.
The two main issues I had with it were 1) It only reports CPU usage in multiples of X%, where X is the number of cores, which was a long-standing SNAFU in the original GNOME version and 2) the usage graphs on the performance screen are light-mode only, even in dark mode, and there's no easy option to change it.
Htop. This is the way.
ps
Quick overview htop
More filtered ps aux
Killing with (p)kill
come system monitor, even on other desktop environments
I like bashtop!
I use XFCE's task manager.
CTRL ALT BACKSPACE always been my favorite « task manager »
Do any Wayland compositors support it?
Yeah when something doesn't seem to be working right, that's my go-to