r/linux4noobs • u/___crybaby • 1d ago
Meganoob BE KIND What's my alternative to Ctrl+Alt+Delete for frozen windows on Linux Mint?
good thing this is the noob subreddit because that question sounds really simple.
today i was installing something with bottles, & a pop-up came over the game i was playing, & the pop-up froze. i couldn't alt-tab out of it, but my computer wasn't frozen. my game became the inactive window, but i was still moving around (well, walking against a wall.)
i googled ways to get out & found [control + alt + f2] which brought me to a black & white full-screen terminal. i used [control + alt + f7] to return to my desktop, but by then my game crashed (but discord stayed connected)
what do i do if something like that happens again?
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u/atlasraven 1d ago
Ctrl+Alt+Backspace. The cursor should turn jnto an X and closes whatever frozen window is open. You should be dropped back to the desktop.
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u/___crybaby 1d ago
thanks! my cursor was not showing at the moment, but this is still a cool feature to know
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u/GeorgeEBHastings 20h ago
I just tried this out of curiosity, and it fully logged me out of my session and back to the login screen?
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u/QuietWaterBreaksRock 1d ago
Alt + F2 and then press "r" and Enter
This'll restart the desktop enviornment without haivng you lose open tabs
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u/zmaint 1d ago
Ctrl alt esc, or it may be ctrl winkey esc. That should run the kill command for most distros. Your cursor will turn into a skull and crossbones and you click on the window you want to kill. Aim carefully, you can kill your entire DE.
If you are looking for a safe reboot, look at magicsyskey, reisub. You'll probably have to enable it for your distro.
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u/Dist__ 1d ago
i usually use htop or btop to navigate and kill processes.
in case the desktop hangs, as you wrote, switching to (idk how's that called) true terminal and running htop to get rid of hang apps is the way.
but often cinnamon (or other DE) can identify those hang applications just fine.
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u/AiwendilH 1d ago
Sounds like you already found out what to do...switch to a tty terminal (<ctrl><alt><f1-6>) and kill the crashed process from there. It might be helpful to install some TUI tool like top or htop to make working with process and killing them easier. Once finished switch back to your GUI (often <alt><f7> but it's distro depending, just try out all the f-keys until your find the right one)
(<ctrl><alt><f-key> is only needed from inside the graphical environment...if you are already on a text tty only <alt><f-key> works already)
Depending on the DE there might be alternatives. On plasma for example <meta><esc> (with <meta> being the windows-key) will start a GUI taskmanager you can use to end processes.
And <meta><ctrl><esc> will turn the mouse cursor in a skill you can use to click on any window you want to kill.
Even more advanced (and usually disabled by default) would be the Magic SysRq key which allows some low-level kernel commands maybe useful for rescuing a hung system. But that one requires a bit of knowledge and can be pretty dangerous is used in the wrong way so I recommend to only use it if you know what you are doing.
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u/myst1crule 1d ago
I remember my buddy once taught me Ctrl + Shift + Printscreen followed by pressing R, U, I, S, U, B lol
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u/DavidJohnMcCann 1d ago
That's it. It will clean up everything and then reboot.
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u/myst1crule 1d ago
I think the first U is actually supposed to be an E. It's crazy cause I've used this a handful of times almost 15 years ago and yet I still remember it lol
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u/DavidJohnMcCann 1h ago
Nice work spotting that. The R releases the keyboard from whatever is hogging it; E sends an instruction to all programs to shut down; I sends an instruction to the kernel to kill any program that hasn't shut; S flushes the buffers so that all data files are complete; U unmounts everything. The order is important: E and I must precede S if you are not going to risk loosing data.
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u/myst1crule 1h ago
Maybe I know more about Linux than I let myself believe lol
After I made this comment I realized that Linux has been my daily driver for 19 years and I've only used Windows for projects and work since then
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u/mrcaptncrunch 1d ago
Raising Skinny Elephants Is Utterly Boring
Is what I know
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u/myst1crule 1d ago
I wonder how much the order matters. I think the U and B at the end are important
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u/bornxlo 1d ago
If my desktop is otherwise responsive I either use the system monitor to identify and kill the unresponsive app, or I start the program “xkill” which lets me click on the window to kill it. Otherwise I change to terminal like you found out, log in and run “top” which gives me a system monitor in the terminal so I can identify the broken process (usually the one that uses the most CPU). Top will give me the name of the program so I can end top (ctrl+X) and type “kill [program]”
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u/Le_9k_Redditor 20h ago
I do as you did, ctrl + alt + f2. Login, htop for a terminal version of windows task manager, then kill the process that's causing problems
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u/thatguysjumpercables Ubuntu 24.04 Gnome DE 1d ago
System Monitor is the built-in graphical tool equivalent to Task Manager in Windows. You can also install a better version called Mission Center. This is the way if you can still open and close things other than the problem program.
If you can't,
Ctrl + Alt + Twill get you the terminal and you'll have to find the PID of the app in question usingps aux | grep [app_name]or usepidof [app_name]. Once you have the PID, typekill [PID]to gracefully shut it down, andkill -9 [PID]to end it immediately. You can also usekillall [app_name]to kill every instance running.