I'm using Linux Mint and recently a pop-up from Bottles froze while I was playing a game. The desktop itself was still responsive—I could move around in the game—but I couldn't switch away from the pop-up with Alt+Tab. I used Ctrl+Alt+F2 to switch to a text terminal and Ctrl+Alt+F7 to return to the desktop, but the game had crashed by then while Discord remained connected. What's the safest and easiest way to close a frozen application next time?
5 Answers
If the graphical desktop won’t respond, switching to another TTY with Ctrl+Alt+F1 through F6 is a reliable fallback. Log in and use htop, top, or btop to find the stuck process. You can then run kill PID for a normal shutdown, or kill -9 PID only if the process refuses to exit. Return to the graphical session with the appropriate function key, often F7, although this varies by system.
You can restart Cinnamon without logging out by pressing Alt+F2, entering r, and pressing Enter. This is useful when the desktop shell is acting up, though it may not terminate the application that caused the original freeze.
That’s good to know, especially if the desktop itself starts behaving strangely.
For a more forceful option, Ctrl+Alt+Esc may activate a kill mode where the cursor changes and you click the window to terminate it. Use it carefully, since clicking the wrong window could close an important part of the desktop. Some desktop environments use a Windows/Meta key combination instead, so the shortcut can vary.
You can also open a terminal with Ctrl+Alt+T and use commands such as pidof application-name, kill PID, or killall application-name. Try a regular kill first; kill -9 should be a last resort. The low-level Magic SysRq commands are another recovery option, but they may need to be enabled and should only be used when you understand their effects.
If the desktop is still working, try the System Monitor and find the frozen application in the process list, then end it. You can also use a graphical tool such as xkill, which turns the cursor into a selector so you can click the window you want to close. Be careful to select only the problem window.
I found System Monitor, so I’ll try that first. I’ll look into xkill too.
htop is especially convenient because it lets you identify and terminate processes interactively instead of looking up the PID manually.