How to easily kill slow or unresponsive programs and windows

(this tutorial originally appeared on the Peppermint forum, it id by mattosensei)

Have you ever been faced with a laggy, unresponsive or crashed application and program window?

It happens - though for me, much less in Linux than in Windows.

Sometimes you can't X out to close the program but you do want to close it down.

There is a very quick and easy terminal command you can use to 'point and kill' the unresponsive program. Simply open up a terminal window using CTRL+ALT+T and then type the code below and hit enter:

xkill

You will then see a X-hair appear. Just hover it over the window that's not responding and click the mouse button. Voila - the process/window/application will be killed.

Note: don't try to kill by clicking in the taskbar at the bottom of your screen as you will inadvertently kill Nemo (the desktop manager running your user interface  ;))

Anyway, a handy little tool in case you're not aware of it. 8)

My "new" rig

It's been a long time since my last post here, sorry for that. A few things lead to this, mainly my problems in dual booting Windows 8.1 with Peppermint 6 and also because I donated my trusty Lenovo S10e netbook to my mother.

So I was stuck without Linux...

Two months in, my Lenovo i3 laptop started to slow down - as Windows 8.1 is horrible. I started longing back to the days when I had a fast computer.

Yesterday I found someone trying to throw away a computer, it had an interesting case and I asked him if he would mind if I "salvaged" it. He said, "be my guest" Turns out it is a pretty sweet computer:

It has an antec case!

For a list of specs:

Mobo:
Foxconn
CPU: Dual core Pentium CPU E5300 2.6 GHZ
RAM: 2 GB
Graphics Card:
AMD RV730 PRO [Radeon HD 4650]

I still can't believe he was throwing this away.

So here is a screenshot, I've installed Conky, but have not changed the default wallpaper (Peppermint 6 is out, I need to do a review at some point).

Linux truly is amazing at repurposing hardware that would have been considered obsolete.

Long live Peppermint Linux!