What do I do, when my PC freezes?

Windows has ctrl+alt+del, does Linux Mint has something comparable? The only thing I know about is REISUB, but that borked my PC, so I am hesitant to use that again.

Are there any remaining alternatives to waiting and/or using the power button?

Edit: Thank you all for your insights and possible fixes. Crashes usually happened when I was running (cpu/ram?) heavy workload. Increasing swap space was not even on my radar, so I did that now. :) Hopefully Mint will run more stable now.

  • FizzyOrange
    27·
    5 days ago

    No, there’s no proper equivalent to Ctrl-Alt-Del. It’s a major flaw in the Linux desktop. You just have to hard-reboot.

    Edit: Downvotes, but you won’t get any suggestions that match Ctrl-Alt-Del. Only

    • Ctrl-Alt-Fn - Disabled by default in lots of distros I think, and it doesn’t have high priority so it’s not guaranteed to respond like Ctrl-Alt-Del does.
    • Magic SysRq - Zero UI, so you have to magically remember a load of random keys, and there’s no way to kill the specific offending process.
    • Ctrl-alt-backspace - Brute force, kills X (does it even work on Wayland?).

    Prove me wrong. Ctrl-alt-delete will respond even when the system is overloaded, and it lets me interactively see a list of processes and kill one of them. Can you do that in Linux?

    Linux is never going to solve this problem while they treat the UI as “just another process”.