No easy way to force closed a program without visible window frames (Force Quit, End Task)

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

Ubuntu 4.10, 5.04, 5.10, 6.06, 6.10, 7.04, 7.10, 8.04, 8.10, 9.04, 9.10, 10.04, 10.10, 11.04, 11.10, 12.04

1. Launch a full-screen application, such as a game.
2. Have the application hang, or get bogged down using 100% of CPU.
3. Try to get out of the application.

What happens: You can't, unless you are the sort of geek who knows about Fn Ctrl Alt F1 and ps and grep and kill -9.

What should happen:
a. You type a keyboard combo (that isn't overridable by anything, not even a game's X grab).
b. A window appears in front of everything else (no matter what other kinds of window are open).
c. The window lists running applications (by icon and proper name).
d. The window is responsive to your input (no matter how much CPU other programs have been using).
e. You select the application you want to force closed, maybe opt in to submitting an error report, and click a button. (If it was running in someone else's account, you authenticate as an administrator.)
f. The application shuts down.

Ubuntu has never had an easy and reliable way of shutting down a badly behaving program. The System Monitor exists, but it was always slow to find in Ubuntu, it is even slower to find in Unity, and it does not meet any of the bracketed requirements above.

The window manager puts up a dialog if the program for a window you try to close doesn't respond, but that works only if (a) the program you need to shut down is one that has a window open, (b) the window even has a border, and (c) the window is not of a type that floats on top of the task manager. (That is, this is not a duplicate of bug 698031.) For example, it won't help you restart a frozen Unity launcher.

There needs to be a way to shut down any application, and secondarily any process, regardless of whether or how it uses windows, and regardless of how much CPU it was using before you invoked the interface. Ideally, for system processes the UI should reflect that they will be restarted rather than ended permanently.

It may save time to design the fix for bug 85170 at the same time as this bug.

See also: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/25861/

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

 status confirmed

MPT, this is very interesting. Let's bounce ideas around in our next
session.