How to terminate a hung fullscreen app?

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1

On Windows,if a fullscreen app (typically a game) hangs and stops responding to input, I can use the “3-fingered salute” (cntl-alt-del), start the task manager, and kill the game easily from there.

In KDE, cntl-alt-del opens the “logout menu” which doesn’t give you a route to list and kill running programs. You are left with having to log out to kill a hung application, which also kills anything else you have running, potentially losing data.

Is it possible to configure KDE to give this capability? It could be by customising the logout menu, or by another route e.g. a custom hotkey sequence to open a terminal running btop.

The key point is that whatever windows pops up needs to be forced to the top of the window stack to ensure it is visible, i’m not sure there is an easy way to do this in a typical shellscript?

2

Meta (Windows key) + Esc opens the system monitor. Just tried with a full screen video player and it came up on top.

Ctrl+Alt+Esc should give you a “kill” cursor and clicking with that on any window should kill the process it belongs to

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usually you can just hit the Meta key and get access to your taskbar to launch a terminal window or the system monitor, etc

4

Thanks for the responses. Cntl-alt-del is burned into muscle memory. Surprising though that a web search didn’t bring up the KDE solution. Maybe that shows how google search has degraded, if it’s not worth generating AI slop for you may not find an answer at all :-}

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You can change the shortcut for bringing up the system monitor to that if you want.

System Settings → Shortcuts or searching for “shortcuts” in application menu, etc.

Going there I just realized that the “Kill Window” shortcut is actually Meta + Alt + Esc now and the one I mentioned earlier is just my local custom one :slight_smile:

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Meta-alt-esc on my machine does nothing, the task manager is mapped to just meta-esc.