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Comment by denysonique | Hacker News Reader

The equivalent in htop is Shift+Z

The problem with htop is that it's a normal program, so when your computer's freezing you can't start htop. The Task Manager is the one thing I miss from Windows. No matter what kind of broken state the computer was in, you could always start the Task Manager.

I don’t think it is quite as reliable as the task manager but on some (most?) Linux distributions you can use control-alt plus function keys to switch away from the graphical user interface to one of the ttys. Some issues affecting your display or window manager can be fixed that way.

> No matter what kind of broken state the computer was in, you could always start the Task Manager.

The only thing that can prevent me from accessing htop, is a kernel panic.

Because, even if the Desktop Environment crashes or freezes (Can't even remember the last time that happened), I can always switch to another virtual console with Ctrl+Meta+F2, login and run any program from there, including starting another DE instance.

And in the equivalent of a kernel panic in windows (BSOD), the Task Manager is inaccessible as well.

The thing that kills linux is being out of RAM (but, to my recollection, not at all Windows - worst-case there'd be a pop-up asking for which process to close (still a GUI! and giving a choice!!)). I lived for a long time with a linux mint system where full RAM meant that even a ctrl+alt+f2 login might take minutes to process, or even just time out. Maybe things are somewhat better now (I also have earlyoom installed) but out-of-memory still is an extremely significant annoyance at its absolute best.

edit: disabled earlyoom & started a process that continuously allocates memory, still happens; ctrl+alt+f2 doesn't respond ever (DE ofc is frozen), and a htop over ssh gives a repaint every couple minutes if I'm lucky, but is useless; just rebooted via the physical reboot button after 30 minutes. Utterly unreasonable behavior.

The reason for this is that in Windows the DE is part of the system so it knows what to keep in memory.

On Linux the DE and shell and htop is just another program so when the system is under high memory pressure those things also get swapped out and back in when they need to run. Thrashing.

If you run something like memlockd to keep vital binaries from being swapped out I'm sure you will see that behaviour improve.

Yes. I've been known to walk away from the computer to get dinner, and come back an hour or so later. Usually by then it's sorted itself out, but not always. Interestingly, Slack is always in a bad state after such a freeze, and needs to be forceably restarted, but everything else is fine. It's generally simpler just to force a reboot.

Funny how user experiences differ. I've had Task Manager fail to open because I dared to unzip a file on a slow harddrive. It's unreliable quite often.

Thanks. It's a real struggle to kill the process you really want when it keeps jumping.

Maybe it's trying to escape

First thing I did when opening the comments was searching for 'htop', I was sure somebody would teach me how to do it there. It did not disappoint. I was always annoyed by it, never occurred to me to look for a solution.

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