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Edit: UX Friendly - something that is intuitive and self explanatory. something you can confidently teach a person once and they'll easily be able to do it again. imagine a classroom where there's already enough things to get hung up on.

Playing Steam games frequently leads to them freezing the entire desktop. Whenever this happens, I have no UX friendly way to recover.

I've read loads of hacky ways to recover, but they all entail memorizing command line stuff, or simply haven't worked when I tried using them.

Is there a UX friendly way of approaching this? Something like Mac and Windows have had since time immemorial, where you press a few keys than select a process and kill it? Or -- if it must be done through terminal -- is there at least a command line tool that makes it easy enough I could teach a child?

Seph Reed
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  • just pressing the Super (Windows) key should show all the open apps unless the whole desktop environment is frozen as well. From there you should be able to hover to the game and click on the big X in that window. Or you can type "mon", click to open the system monitor which is just like the Windows task manager you're so in love with. But, again, unless completely frozen you should be able to close any open windows individually. – ChanganAuto Apr 28 '22 at 22:25
  • Strangely enough, I've never encountered a "freeze" scenario where the OS was at all responsive beyond CTRL+ALT+F1. But given it can respond to that, surely it can recover without a full system power cycle. – Seph Reed Apr 28 '22 at 22:27
  • There's always the last resort to reboot gracefully: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key – ChanganAuto Apr 28 '22 at 22:29
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    You've provided no OS/release/product details.. Child? FYI: Children usually pick things up easier than us adults (depending on age) – guiverc Apr 28 '22 at 22:29
  • Does this answer your question? What should I do when Ubuntu freezes? – Nmath Apr 28 '22 at 22:31
  • Magic SysRq is really cool from a development perspective, but is just not the kind of thing that is self-explanatory. Nor is anything in the linked question. I'm sure you've all used CTRL-ALT-DELETE before, this is the level of "intuitively obvious" I'm searching for. – Seph Reed Apr 28 '22 at 22:33
  • Once you press the key combo, it’s pretty easy to trial and error your way forwards. Command lines have a much wider breath of possible interactions. I’m not running anything with high requirements. And the ctrl+alt+f2 doesn’t respond. – Seph Reed Apr 28 '22 at 23:13
  • The reason CRTL+ALT+F1 is not helpful is because this is the key combination to get back to your desktop from a TTY. If you want to get to a TTY use CTRL+ALT+F2. From there you can use sudo reboot. If CTRL+ALT+F2 does not get you to a TTY, then your system is totally unresponsive and it's impossible to use any kind of GUI to solve the problem-- just like when you have an unresponsive system in Windows and CTRL+ALT+DEL doesn't work either. You should force reboot and try to fix the cause of the problem. – Nmath Apr 28 '22 at 23:15
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    I suggest that you ask about your actual problem and provide details about that problem. This is an XY Problem -- even if you find an acceptable answer to this question, it doesn't actually solve your real problem. – Nmath Apr 28 '22 at 23:19
  • I don't care about the actual problem. It's okay if a game doesn't run on Ubuntu, it's okay if Proton has issues. But I want to recover the system without doing a full reboot. – Seph Reed Apr 29 '22 at 04:11

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Apparently the answer is simply: no, there is no user friendly way to recover when a game freezes the os. There are ways to recover, but — to date — they have not been given any form of UI that might guide users towards the solution or give novices confidence they aren’t going to mess something up.

Seph Reed
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