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Recently I have been facing multiple system freezes where I could move the cursor, but nothing would respond. I couldn't click on anything.

I could, however, switch between open apps using Alt+Tab, but still could not interact with them using the mouse.

I could open new terminals using Ctrl+Alt+T, yet mouse would not work!

In Windows, when a similar event happened, I could easily restart explorer.exe and everything would go back to normal. Is there anything like that in Ubuntu?

I'm asking this because rebooting is not always an option, neither is logging-out, since I may have running scripts/apps doing their chores. Also killing the app(s) that consume a lot of CPU is not an option always since I rarely face such occasions and more often than not, the cause of system freezing is not CPU usage.

David Foerster
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Hossein
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  • Have you tried sudo lightdm restart? – Kev Inski Apr 24 '18 at 10:55
  • @kevinInski: No, I feared It also shuts off all of the open apps/scripts. so I asked to get the safe answer! – Hossein Apr 24 '18 at 11:33
  • I beleive sudo lightdm restart will restart your desktop session, it is what I would do (have done a few times) to resolve a desktop crash. – hatterman Apr 24 '18 at 12:56
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    Yeah, definitely check that question out. The Alt+F2 Unity thing should be your solution as well. Keep in mind anything that touches lightdm or gdm will log you out. – Different55 Apr 24 '18 at 13:19
  • I just used Alt+F2 and then clicked on unity (with the grears icon!) it seemed it restarted it! the chrome was shut down, however, the terminals were intact! What is the terminal way of doing so in case Alt+F and search doesnt work ? – Hossein Apr 24 '18 at 14:33
  • So Alt+F2 is the same as doing ? sudo service lightdm restart. – Hossein Apr 24 '18 at 14:37
  • One thing to note, After doing Alt+F2, all applications were shut down except terminals and those shipped with ubuntu! My chrome, video player, FileZilla (which was working for the last several hours backing up files from my server!,) sublime text all were shut down! So Thats not the best way either! – Hossein Apr 24 '18 at 16:22

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