[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.