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Where is Linux not working well in your daily usage? Share your pain points as of 2026, so we can respectfully discuss (discuss.online)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.world
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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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[–] 29 points 9 months ago (22 children)

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

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  • [–] [S] 17 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    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?

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    Ctrl+alt+t -> xkill -> click window you want to terminate

    But yes I agree that seeing a better GUI of open programs and attached processes would be good to have.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (4 children)

    I had a problem with Unity games on Steam freezing the PC due to fractional scaling. In that case not even the terminal would show up. Also, if I switch away from a fullscreen application, I won't have it available to be terminated using xkill, right?

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    In case you haven't tried it, you can run Steam games in native Wayland mode, and get a more stable experience. Especially with fractional scaling. There are two steps:

    1. Install a GE-Proton runner, and configure the game to use it.
    2. Set game launch options to, env DISPLAY="" PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 %command%
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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago* (1 child)

    If you can't see the terminal, then that's pretty bad so idk -> if everything goes unresponsive I just slap my monitor in impotent fury and reboot

    If you can see the terminal but not the window, idk if xkill would work. Then you'd need to find the process id and kill it with pkill.

    Like say you're playing age of empires 2: pgrep aoe (should return all running processes called aoe with their pids > process: aoe2 pid: 69420 ...or something like that) then: pkill 69420 > ded

    https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/pgrep.1.html

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago (5 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.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago* (2 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.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months 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

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (2 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.

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