I just updated to 25.10 and noticed that when an app locks up, I can not do something similar to xkill on it on Wayland. This are apps like sublimetext or vscode that when locked, not even the kill -9 will work on them, or terminating them using the gnome system monitor, but on X11, when i did xkill it would kill them outright.
This was something every important since it does not waste time for me to keep on working or testing. So does wayland, gnome or ubuntu 25.10 have something that will do a kill in a “I was not asking for permission, I was just killing you. Goodbye” attitude.
There’s no such thing in Wayland (the protocol), but some compositors (sway, kwin) do define a way to disconnect a client. Sadly the compositor of Gnome is not one of them.
Since xkill can’t actually terminate programs (it ‘only’ closes the connection between a program and the X-server), I’m kind of surprised by your claims that xkill could stop programs that ‘kill -9’ couldn’t.
That is what is happening on 25.10 right now. kill, killall or kill -9 are not doing anything on wayland for when sublimetext or vscode lock. But on 25.04 I was able to easily kill them with xkill or any other command.
While yes, a tool like this would be helpful, In parallel, I’d be investigating why Sublime Text and VSCode are locking up. Any hints from the journal, or syslog?
Hi @popey , no sorry, nothing. Like they simply froze in time. I checked journal, dmesg, syslog, cat a bunch of files and nothing. They simply locked (froze) and even though I could drag the window around, I was not able to minimize, close or kill.
It might be helpful to start the offending programs from the terminal because most programs will send a lot of messages to standard output which will get lost when started from the GUI but will be visible in the Terminal from which you started them.
Thank you buddy. I found that in KDE it works. I gotta finish several work related tasks but by December I will move to Kubuntu (also I love KDE since 3.x) so that is a win win.