I believe cinnamon uses gnome system monitor by default so there should be a way to set a custom hotkey for it in settings.

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.

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.

Still one of those things that comes up a lot. It’s been causing issues for 3 separate computers in the house all on very different hardware. Whenever I search about it I find lots of current complaints about it. So it’s still one of those things that needs to be ironed out.

On and off linux user since ages past. Not the most linux guru type. I’m fine with opening the terminal and doing things as needed, but I still have to look up half the command, for example.

Anyway… windows / m$ finally just pissed me off so much I switched entirely to CachyOS / KDE for my daily driver. I tried a few distros with limited success before settling into that one. I wanted something that would have fairly fresh updates and be easy to setup for gaming. CachyOS really was a pretty seamless experience. Their “just make gaming work” button just made gaming work (I’m still on nvidia for the time being unfortunately).

There is one hiccup that is a common problem with all linux distros I have used for one reason or another. Wake from sleep is a thorn in linux’s side. The s3 deep sleep issue hasn’t been a problem on cachy as far as I can tell… but there is an feature of nvidia where it tries to save the vram components on sleep and then reinitialize them on wake using a daemon or a service… but sometimes this crashes (as far as I can tell) on sleep… so it goes to sleep… and the system wakes up fine… but it will never actually reactivate the screen… and it waits for video to kick in… so it’s essentially locking the system and I have to force reboot. It isn’t every single time, and the lastest patch of the driver seems to have made it less frequent, but I still don’t leave anything open I’m afraid of losing when I put the system to sleep because of it. If that could be fixed, it would be basically running perfectly.

I’ve basically gotten all my apps back up and running (with one windows only app that I don’t use regularly so it’s fine). Gaming has been great. I can’t think of much that I play that hasn’t worked by just clicking “play” in steam or heroic… and when they don’t work… it’s almost always just a quick trip to protondb to figure out which proton version I need to use and then it’s fine.

Actually I have found one other weird bug where discord sometimes keeps running, but won’t allow me to type at all. I can see incoming text, and close the app normally so it isn’t crashed, but I can’t type or paste into it until I restart it. It’s some kind of weird error with electron from what I understand but I haven’t done a deep dive to fix it yet.

So after fulling switching to linux and helping a couple other people also switch for daily driver, I would say we’re at the point where linux is ready for the “average user”. We’ve been creeping up on that for a while, but there’s been a lot of improvements to QoL in the last couple years that make it a feasible prospect for most people at this point. Some distros like linuxmint I feel like you could install and just use without every needing the terminal or having much of anything missing from “non-techie normal user” standpoint.

I had forgotten that KDE was doing another core showcase distro.

KDE Linux is an “immutable base OS” Linux distro created using Arch Linux packages, but it should not be considered an “Arch-based distro”; Arch is simply a means to an end, and KDE Linux doesn’t even ship with the pacman package manager.

KDE Linux leans on Systemd for a great deal of functionality. Updates are atomic and image-based, with the last 5 OS images cached on disk. Only the Wayland session is supported. Apps primarily come from Flatpak and Snap.

What? This just sounds like a linux fever dream lol. Definitely interested to see what they do though.

Yeah, that was the point I was making in part 2 of the OP… I’ve just heard that some debian distros (mostly heard about ubuntu) will still just do whatever it feels like. Having trouble finding concrete info if that’s still an issue though :/

Also, Mint kinda follows Ubuntu’s release cycle, so I would say it’s as up to date as Ubuntu

They follow Ubuntu LTS… so the core is a every four version which is 2 years between core updates.

Part of the thoughts on kubuntu was that it will be far more up to date with the KDE versions.

The two reasons I prefer Mint over native *buntu is because of Cinnamon

Absolutely. Cinnamon is great. That was the other WM that they liked but eventually decided that they wanted to use KDE.

They may well decide they want to distro hop or settle into a more stable system that doesn’t change much in the future, but the semi-annual model of changing to the latest UI/UX while still having a longer testing phase ended up being the most appealing option.

The faster release cycle was something I wanted to keep without committing to rolling release. Debian does what… 2 years per release? I considered Mint but they are more focused on “stable” and I’m hoping for a fresher system (also moving to wayland is definitely a friction point for mint dev).