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Comment by josefx | Hacker News Reader

> Graphical artifacts, freezing, stuttering, and even full OS reboots.

I have seen similar on Windows. For example when Bioshock Remastered Freezes there is no way to exit it, windows still responds, but there is no way to close the game because everything you open is hidden by it. Also the amount of Graphical glitches I encountered in Skyrim is just hilarious. DotA 2 seems to sometimes glitch out when you hit alt tab while it loads. That is just the games I played the last few weeks, I think there is not a single game that isn't somehow broken on Windows either.

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For situation like this, make sure you have at least 2 virtual desktops available and then alt+tab and then ctrl+win+arrow key to switch to an empty virtual desktop and open task manager.

this is the way, you don't even have to have 2 desktops open, just win + tab and then open a new one for taskmgr.

In the past (ie Win7 days and before..) I always made a point to set games to "Windowed Fullscreen" wherever possible as that vastly improved Windows' stability.

It was probably bad for graphical quality/performance/latency but being able to temporarily exit games without worrying about a crashing desktop was more important for me.

Apparently that's still an issue then..

I've found using borderless "fullscreen" to actually improve latency. I had a lot of trouble with deflecting on Sekiro when I was running in fullscreen mode that I found immediately went away once I started running it borderless.

For this kind of situations xkill is marvelous.

I've used Windows xKill [1] for years, but I can't find a download link for which you don't have to sign in...

Alternatively, SuperF4 [2] looks decent, also with a separate CLI only xkill found in the github issues [3].

[1] https://www.deviantart.com/suprvillain/art/Windows-xKill-100...

[2] https://stefansundin.github.io/superf4/

[3] https://github.com/stefansundin/superf4/issues/39#issuecomme...

Many tiling wm offer something like that out of the box (and KDE among the mainstream desktop managers)

Worst case, on most Linux setups just C-A-Fnum to a TTY, log back in, and `kill -9` the offending PID from the command line.

Sysinternals’ process explorer gives you a crosshairs to select a window’s process — that crossbones pointer has more style though.

> I have seen similar on Windows.

Sure, but Windows is supported, so instead of going to a forum and being unhelpfully told to try a different distro, you can take up your issue with the developer and they're much more likely to pay attention. Granted, some of them still have shitty support, but you're a lot less likely to be dismissed out of hand.

> you can take up your issue with the developer and they're much more likely to pay attention.

Outside of indie, is this something people actually (and successfully) do?

For everyone I know the default assumption when a game doesn’t work is you’re SOL and either refund or hope for patches.

And where do you think the patches come from?

> is this something people actually (and successfully) do?

No. You fix it yourself, move on with your life or spend a few hours getting shit on by customer support and then move on. Videogames are an industry where you need to expect to be disrespected, because those companies do not care a whit about you.

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