How to kill non-responsive GUI task under Unity?

Solution 1:

You could create a keyboard shortcut for xkill.

1. Type keyboard in the Unity Dash and click the icon. Select the shortcuts tab.

2. There, scroll down to the custom shortcuts section and click on the + button

3. Now name your shortcut something and let the command be xkill and then click ok.

4. Finally click on the xkill shortcut and press the desired key-combo to assign a shortcut to it and that's it :)
5. Pressing the keyboard shortcut will activate xkill whenever you need it.

Solution 2:

The best way I find is using terminal window :

goto terminal :

sudo ps -aux | grep "name of application"

note down the process ID

sudo kill -9 "processID"

since, If GUI application becomes unresponsive, for time-being it slows down the X(GUI) and all actions would be slowed down, so any gui action for closing the process will be slow.

Solution 3:

Another thing you can do is to run System Monitor. You can select a process with the mouse and hit the "End Process" button to kill it. This should even work with unresponsive processes but I don't think it is as strong as kill -9. It does have the advantage that it is a totally GUI solution and is very similar to the analogous Activity Monitor in Mac OS X. That's helpful to those of us who move back and forth between Mac and Linux.