[artemonster]

how do you deal with absence of working task manager? any random hang-up is a forced restart, no way to kill offending process as EVERYTHING just freezes up. Tried forcing myself to migrate to Linux, even after forcing no updates, a lot of things magically stop working or break, forcing me to spend hours on google to fix some crap by copypasting random nonsense into terminal. I just want to use my PC, not be a debugger non stop.

[capableweb]

> how do you deal with absence of working task manager?

I usually end up using something like htop for a quick overview, together with nvidia-smi when I do GPU-related stuff.

> any random hang-up is a forced restart, no way to kill offending process as EVERYTHING just freezes up.

I've not had this happen for as long as I've used Linux, besides GPU driver bugs/crashes that brought down the computer, but I've had this happen more frequently on Windows than Linux. Processes using up all CPU should make the computer a lot slower to use, but shouldn't bring it down. Processes using up all RAM should be killed by the OOM manager that you distribution should include (but anyways you should have swap setup to avoid the situation in the first place). Processes using up all disk space is a bit harder, but again shouldn't bring the computer down.

> a lot of things magically stop working or break, forcing me to spend hours on google to fix some crap by copypasting random nonsense into terminal.

I'm guessing the problem of having things stop working/breaking "magically" is a effect of random copypasting stuff into the terminal, not the other way around.

Linux does want you to learn about the system in order for you to not mangle it, which has it's good and bad sides. Think of it like a chef having sharp knives in order to do their job better, it's true that you could do more damage if you fuck up, but their job requires them to have professional knowledge about the tools they use, and the knowledge about how to use those tools in a good way.

[thomastjeffery]

> spend hours on google to fix some crap

That's the Windows way. It's a bad fit for Linux, because there is no one true obsessively-backwards-compatible Linux.

The good news is we don't need it: Linux isn't a black box, so we don't need to guess or study its behavior. We can look it up instead. The goal here is to construct understanding from documentation, as opposed to deconstructing behavior from testing.

Some great starting points to get your bearings are:

- https://wiki.archlinux.org/

- https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Main_Page

- man pages

[masklinn]

Every distribution has its variation of a task manager, and there’s always (h)top and kill as baseline standards.

Having everything lock up I don’t think I’ve ever seen, only way I could see that happen is a runaway process eats all the memory of the machine, and somehow dodges the OOM killer. Especially if the machine is configured with no swap (don’t do that).

And I’m saying that as someone who doesn’t really like linux.

> forcing me to spend hours on google to fix some crap by copypasting random nonsense into terminal

Have you considered that “copy pasting random nonsense into terminal” could be the source of your issues?

[mplanchard]

Ubuntu ships with woefully inadequate swap these days. We have to advise our employees to customize the installation process, or they get hangs while building C or Rust packages that sound like what GP is describing

[masklinn]

That is frustrating to read. Swap you're not using doesn't hurt anyone, but having no swap can really screw you up.

[majewsky]

Both KDE and Gnome have task manager apps as far as I'm aware. And even then, in my experience it's very rare to observe any kind of hang-up that requires restarting the entire PC. Might be because I use a different set of applications. What applications do you observe these hang-ups with?

[roxil]

If things are so frozen that you can't open System Monitor (task manager), try this: Hold down SysRq and Alt, let go of SysRq, keep holding down Alt, then press these buttons in order (don't need to hold them): REISUB - to remember it: "Raising Elephants Is So Utterly Boring", also known as "raising the elephant".

On some systems you need to enable this feature first, so try it out once to see if it works and look up how to enable it, if it doesn't.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

On most distros, you can also get into a command line, with the combination CTRL + ALT + F1 - F8 (try out which function keys do it for you and how to get back to the GUI). There you can use `ps`, `kill <pid>`, `reboot now` or restart the GUI. I'd keep a note of the exact commands on my phone just in case.

As a sidenote, I've had an issue on a good windows desktop PC where it freezes when watching YouTube or ither streaming services. I can still move the mouse for a bit, but clicking does nothing and I'm unable to even save it from a hard reset with Ctrl + Alt + Delete. Sometimes it won't happen for weeks, but if I'm unlucky multiple times in an hour. Look up "PC freezes while watching YouTube" and you will see I'm far from alone with this issue, Asus motherboards with new AMD processors seem to be the common factor. Haven't had this happen on Linux yet (dual boot) and I've tried everything to avoid these unusual freezes in windows, but nothing seems to help.

[sotapanna]

Are you on Windows 11? There is an ongoing fTPM issue with AMD firmware that can cause behavior like that. I had this issue and ultimately just disabled TPM in the BIOS. Its supposed to be required for Win 11, but I haven't seen any issues since disabling.

[roxil]

I will try this, thanks.

[wintermutestwin]

Well this is the perfect example of the infuriatingly arcane crap that I have to deal with on Linux. Every time I need to do something on Linux, I have to look it up and then when I do - it is some crazy long explanation of hoops I need to jump through to make it happen. I try to keep track of these notes, but it all takes so much time.

I am hoping someone comes up with a fully dis-arcaned distro. Especially ditch (or remap) goofy command line relics into the obvious and easily remembered. Why do we still use CP instead of Copy? Legacy stuff that greybeards would freak if it were changed. Let them use a greybeard distro and make one that is for joe user.

Yes, I use Mint and it is still full of arcane crap.

[nikau]

yes, i much prefer the mac experience where it crashes and says sorry in 13 different languages.

[Zetobal]

You sound like my mom when she swears she did nothing and it just stopped working. We both know she did something but we also know I will just reinstall windows for her because she really doesn't want to learn something new.

[zulban]

It definitely sounds like you just need to learn a few more basic skills to use Linux.

Also good to note: there's tons of problems uniquely with windows that I'm sure are just "computer problems" and "computer slowness" to you, and you never blame windows.

[listenallyall]

Not the OP - but I think it's the use of the word "basic" that turns a lot of people off.

"Basic" in Windows is all stuff you can easily do with a mouse. Getting anywhere with Linux requires comfort with the command line, OK, but even after spending a decent amount of time, there are lots of system-specific and application-specific commands that you need to master to actually get the system humming. And a total rabbit hole when errors start to pop up. Getting a handle on all of this, being able to understand and fix errors, this is well beyond "basic" and the condescending attitude "just need to learn a few more basic skills" is a huge turn-off. Saying nothing is more helpful than telling someone they just need to learn "basic skills."

[vxNsr]

Yup, the nice thing about windows was everything was accessible by both mouse and keyboard so for people who needed the gui to figure things out it’s there for you and for people who are comfortable on the keyboard you used to be able to never think about the mouse. (This is no longer the case on windows 10 even, they’ve totally neutered keyboard navigation and you often need to reach for the mouse or use the arrow keys excessively for many things now).

Linux requires being super comfortable on the keyboard, using cli nearly exclusively and recalling with perfect accuracy arcane letter incantations which if you know the guy who wrote the program and the full name of his dog makes sense but to everyone else is just random letters strung together.

[skinner927]

ctrl+alt+f2 to switch to tty2. Log in and reap whatever is hanging. Logout. ctrl + alt + f7 (usually) to get back to the GUI.

[Grimburger]

I'd suggest Bottom as a TUI alternative to the in-built task managers - https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom

It works on Windows also and in my opinion is better than the default on there too.

[lawn]

I've never experienced that EVERYTHING freezes up.

If something hangs I just kill or pkill it via the terminal.

[Corsome]

> how do you deal with absence of working task manager?

I see people offering nice advice here but I mostly do ps aux | grep thing and then kill (-9) it... or killall :)

> any random hang-up is a forced restart, no way to kill offending process as EVERYTHING just freezes up.

I had the everything freeze up experience initially on a Dell laptop and frankly don't know what was the cause. Maybe missing microcode updates or old firmware? Nowadays it almost never happens (I don't remember it happening over the months). I have an app crash (like Firefox) ~once a month but it's so rare I barely notice.

[artemonster]

I know how to use ps or top. what to do when you cannot launch terminal even?

[Corsome]

Ctrl+alt+f2 (Or any other F) will give you additional login terminal.

[joshspankit]

Counter-intuitively my usual go-to is to SSH in from another device (phone, tablet, another computer). 95% of the time when the UI is locked up the ssh daemon is still responsive.

Note: I also do this on macOS but it’s much less useful since there are very few commands to actually restore a session that’s locked up.

[asddubs]

I never have the problem of everything hanging except on an old laptop with only 4gb memory, in OOM conditions. If a program hangs I can just use the KDE task manager or kill -9 to make it compliant

[gavinhoward]

htop is a good task manager. At least for me.

[blooalien]

On the terminal, all the various "modern" replacements for `top` (btop, htop, bottom [mentioned in an earlier comment], etc.) are all really great. Many are almost on-par with their graphical counterparts these days.

[artemonster]

what do you do if you cannot launch it? because everything is frozen

[no_time]

switch to another tty(ctrl+alt+(f1..f12)), log in and launch htop from there.

Unless you are dealing with a kernel panic, this will work.

[gavinhoward]

What no_time said is the answer. Me personally, I always have it running so that I can see what is running.