In my experience it is more the reverse is true. If a program truly craps out on me in windows i could at least get the task manager to show / use it to terminate the offender or reboot, at least back when i still used it.
Meanwhile my bazzite task manager is notably not a native part of the OS and takes a few seconds to load, and if the system is in some sort of frozen screen state my only real recourse is hitting the physical force reboot button. The windows manager could sometimes recover from those.
Overall it is of course a much better experience compared to Windows regardless, but still. Everything being essentially modular pieces compiled into a system can evidently also have minor downsides.
I have recovered many times from a broken window session in Linux by switching to a console with ctrl-alt-fN, logging in, and either killing the offending program or just rebooting gracefully.
In Windows my last resort before the nuclear power button is Task Manager with ctrl-esc or ctrl-alt-delete.
Honestly, yes.
Linux lacks a native Task manager, and this is one of the “death by a thousand cuts” roadblocks that prevent its adoption.
A user must be able to launch a graphical tool to manage processes even if everything else froze. That’s just basic usability.
Can it be currently resolved with a terminal? Yes. Should it be resolved with a terminal? No.
ctrl-alt-f2 (or f3, f4)
this should switch away from graphical mode to a terminal.
log in kill whatever needs killin’
I thought Linux was supposed to be easy to use and that implies not needing to use a terminal?
In everyday use you shouldn’t need to use the terminal but for crashes it can be very helpful to switch between ttys
/c/programmer_ignorance
This meme gets crustier and crustier every time I see it. It’s amazing after all these years people still post this.
I kind of love it though it’s like tje fine wine of the internet getting worse and worse yet better and better with time.
Each repost adds another layer of artifact and grit until you can barely make out what the original even meant. It’s been screenshotted and cropped and saved and shared, on Facebook and Reddit and Xitter who cared? From phone to phone and site to site the pixels crumble day and night!
The colors fade, the text grows blurry, reposted fast, reposted hurry! Through Discord servers, Instagram feeds and Fedi-instance’s it spreads like mold, like digital weeds! One hundred times! One thousand more! The quality drops right through the floor! And yet we laugh and yet we share this crusty meme beyond repair!
So let it crumble, let it fray, this meme will live another day. For in its crust we find the truth, the internet’s eternal youth!
The image’s content is plain wrong. Waxing poetic about JPEG artifacts doesn’t make this image any more interesting or funny. It’s just dumb.
Eh, it’s funny even if it’s inaccurate.
Isn’t that what
SIGTERMis? A request to gracefully shutdown processes.Systemd waits until the services terminate before shutting down
kill, and I swear to god if you’re still there when Ips, I’m getting out the-9Okay that took me by surprise
I’ll be sharing this
alias murder="kill -9"Yeah, by default
killsends sigterm, and not kill the process at all.It’s the correct behavior, sending sigkill by default would be harmful. Now take a look at how
killallworked in Solaris (before it adopted GNU).
How’s that differ from
SIGHUP?They’re different signals. The default handling is the same - terminate - but they’re triggered by different things and (if the process handles them) handled by separate handlers.
Historical context, delivery, and handling.
HUP—hang up—is sent to indicate the TTY is closed.
TERM—terminate— is sent by request.What happens when received is usually up to the process. Most of them just leave the defaults, which is to exit.
killall -9
Ironically it’s actually the opposite. Linux has signals, and with the exception of SIGKILL and I think SIGABRT they can all be handled gracefully. Windows on the other hand doesn’t have signals, it can only TerminateProcess() which is forceful. The illusion of graceful termination on windows is done by sending a Window close message to all of the windows belonging to a given process, however in the event the process has no windows, only forceful termination is available due to the lack of a real mechanism to gracefully terminate processes. That’s why the taskkill command tells you a process requires forceful termination when you run it against something headless.
You’re right about Linux but you’re wrong about windows. It is sent to the event loop in windows https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winmsg/window-notifications. It’s been a long time since it was my job, but you actually had to pass a certification that your application exited gracefully in response to these messages as part of the partner program back in the day.
You clearly didn’t read my message…I said a “window close message.” I.e…WM_CLOSE. that is not a process signal, it’s a window management signal. Hence taskkill not working without /f on headless processes
Long running headless processes on windows generally still have an event loop and a window handle via which they process those messages.
…right…tell that to cmd.exe or the OpenVPN daemon, or the soft ether VPN daemon, or OpenConsole.exe, or Idk, I only tested 4 that immediately came to mind but my point stands. There are a lot of programs that do not have a window handle and do not bother with window messages.
Service (daemon) lifecycles are managed via the system services api.
Yep, I’m aware of that too, doesn’t change my initial point
It also means the OS is in total control of the things it’s running. This goes for running programs, shutting down, and crashing. The only crashes I have on my Linux are when I use up memory, and I’m still convinced that even though everything looks seized up, if I left it for hours or days it would probably end up resolving itself. I’ve had some cases where the OS saw the program wasn’t going in a good direction fast enough and killed it.
Most linux systems have two OOM killers, one in the kernel that will execute as a last resort when your system is already frozen up, and one in systemd that should run earlier to prevent your system from freezing up. That one works sometimes, I think it does an okay job actually.
Windows does, in fact, have signals. They’re just not all the same as Unix signals, and the behavior is different. Here’s a write-up.
You’re correct there is no “please terminate but you don’t have to” signal in Windows. Windowless processes sometimes make up their own nonstandard events to implement the functionality. As you mentioned, windowed processes have WM_CLOSE.
Memory access violations (akin to SIGSEGV), and other system exceptions can be handled through Structured Exception Handling.
TIL about the console signaling stuff, good to know. I am aware of SEH but that seemed a little too in the weeds for this discussion since that’s as you say akin to SIGSEGV
The NT kernel was all built to emulate object orientation (read Smalltalk, not C++) style message passing. That’s because it was the 90s, and it’s the new technology kernel.
So yeah, expect everything to have more flexibility sending data around, and no standardization at all so you can’t have any generic functionality.
Plus, if something seemingly can’t be terminated with that, 99% of the time it’s a kernel level lockup (e.g. disk IO). At which point you only have 2 options: kill it via a kernel debugger or (the more likely scenario) perform a reboot.
sig bart
That’s fucked up
While the meme is very funny, it is technically incorrect. Linux has two major ways of terminating a process. When Linux wants a process to terminate execution (for whatever reason) it first sends the SIGTERM signal to the process, which basically “asks” the process to terminate itself. This has the advantage, that the process gets the chance to save its state in a way, that the execution can continue at another time. If the process however ignores the SIGTERM signal at some point Linux will instead forcefully terminate the execution using the SIGKILL signal. This represents what the image shows.
Before someone gets mat at me: I know, that there are like 50 more Signals relevant to this, but wanted to keep it simple.
Simple answer for us simple folk. I like it. Thank you!
Does the “SIG” stands for “Signal”?
Special Interest Group. An internal committee convenes to decide the fate of the process.
(I don’t know the answer, but I’m pretty sure it stands for signal.)
It’s Secret Intervention Group, but close enough.
I guess, but would have to look that up too (there are quite a lot of signals starting with SIG, so it would make sense that it is this way)
I like to secretly imagine it stands for SIG SAUER. Bang = process ded
Eh, it works more than 80% of the time.
80% of the time it works every time!
You’re likely bumping into processes which are blocked by IO or are zombies.
The problem with Sig is they work too oftem, particularly when you don’t want them to
I think it is showing sigterm correctly. Sigkill wipes you from existence without leaving a body or trace of memory.
While the meme is very funny, it is technically incorrect.
The worst kind of incorrect!
kill -9 that motherfucker.
I get it windows is evil and bloated, blah blah blah.
But to hear some of you describe the problems that you have using windows makes me think that you’re as incompetent as my grandmother.
I do find it a little amusing the people complain about things that are (an admittedly advanced) config away from being the way they want. As if Linux doesn’t have settings buried in a similar way to registry changes.
Graceful like closing a laptop and putting it in a backpack only to have windows refuse to shutdown and become a heater until it cooks the battery and ruins the screen…
Isn’t that more of a PEBCAK?
I literally had this happen with my desktop last night, and it’s entirely down to Windows actively choosing to go into sleep mode or not. No activity on the computer, click on sleep, the monitors go off and I started to walk away except I noticed that my keyboard and mouse were still on (the first things to turn off when Windows goes to sleep for me) and the fans were still running. Wiggled the mouse and it had only turned the monitors off. I tried it 2 or 3 more times and Windows kept doing the same thing - putting the monitors to sleep and nothing else. I eventually just straight up shut it down with the power button.
Nope. Go read about the “modern suspend” a.k.a. S0ix horror stories. Totally the fault of Microsoft+manufacturers, happens in Linux and Windows.
It absolutely isn’t. If a laptop lid is closed, it needs to be sleeping, period. No random updates, no search indexing. I’ve also had this happen after explicitly putting laptops into sleep AND closing the lid. No idea how Apple is the only company able to do this consistently.
If a laptop lid is closed, it needs to be sleeping, period.
See, and here I feel the exact opposite. If it’s docked I don’t want it going to sleep just because I closed the lid. I still want to be able to use the two screens that are attached and in use!
If a screen is connected that’s another thing, though even that can lead to overheating. For example, a lot of modern laptops suck in air through the keyboard and having the lid closed while working messes up their thermal performance, and heats up the screen to an unhealthy degree.
But having it wake up and try installing an update while sitting in a bag, closed and disconnected from a screen, is a straight up fire hazard, and it happened to me multiple times with windows laptops.
no search indexing
hear me out. how about … there doesn’t need to be a background process that runs constantly and consumes 30% of your processing power and makes the fan spin all the time because it generates so much heat.
I am stuck using an otherwise old but theoretically bearable PC at work running Windows 11 from a spinning HDD. But I’ll tell you, when I dug through the registry to turn off all the background indexing nonsense, it became damn near usable.
Never happened to me lmao. Apple is for tech illiterates anyways so it’s inconsequential.
This absolutely can and does happen on Apple hardware
I haven’t used a mac for over a decade, but for the decade or so before that it never happened to me once, either on an iBook or MBP. Perhaps something changed in the meantime.
Apple laptops are typically extremely good when it comes to sleep and suspend.
A major advantage of having a very small range of hardware you have to support is that it’s pretty easy to test all possible combinations and make sure they work well together. As far as I’m concerned, Apple has been, and probably always will be the undisputed champion of doing this right.
As a long time user of BSD laptops (apple) I’ve never had one surprise me when the screen was closed. FWIW I never buy these bsd laptops, they are given to me by $current.employer for work.
I think I’ve had it happen once over something like a decade of using them. From what I remember it was because I was running something in the terminal that ignored the signals it was sent, so the laptop didn’t properly go to sleep. Of course, the program ended up failing because a lot of the things it depended on did suspend themselves and that caused major breakage.
Luckily I noticed a whining sound (fans at maximum speed) from my backpack before anything too bad happened.
To be honest, Mint is no better in that regard on my laptop. Closing my laptop and pulling the power adapter always results in the system not going to sleep mode, but remaining active. Opening it will actually cause it to resume going to sleep. Really annoying.
worse. windows literally goes to sleep when i close the lid after i told it to shutdown.
so when i boot it up again, what happens? inevitably it wakes from sleep, only to remember that i told it to shut down, then it shuts down. then i have to boot again.
This is old windows problem, 11 does not do it on my work pc, I think
Maybe it is vendor specific 🧐
Windows: If you can’t exit gracefully, I’ll make sure you never exit at all
Oh dear, my toe seems to have found the switch on my surge protector. I win.
Now Windows won’t boot
Take the upgrade
Yup. Sometimes you like to fire a few shots manually just for fun.
Sudo htop
“I wonder how important this is….”
Nothing happens
Hmm
I once accidentally unmounted the system drive. You know what? Aside from some crash messages and a lost battery indicator, the system just kept going.
I finished my Zoom call just fine, finished what I needed to do real quick and then rebooted.
It all went back and was just fine.
A friend of mine has a Laptop, where you can easily pull out out the hard drive while the OS is running. We once did that and it worked kinda fine. After plugging the hard drive back in it continued to run like before.
Which OS?
Linux
I was thinking more kill -9
I fully support Linux, but Firefox doesn’t deserve that kind of heat. Yes, the Mozilla Foundation has been in hot water over the press release describing the direction and implementation of AI into the browser. But compared to the competition they are still are far better then the rest.
The joke’s not about Firefox; you could swap in any Linux program.
I killed-9 but if I’m done I’m done and just calling a hard soft reboot with REISUB and if you know you know
Lolol I just needed that yesterday
Windows treats user commands like most tech treats consent. Negotiable, ignorable.
Linux brooks no bullshit. The program will do as it is told.
That isn’t exclusively true. Programs can capture SIGTERM and ignore it, or do as they please, SIGKILL is non-negotiable though.
Windows does have an equivalent to SIGKILL as well, in
taskkill /F.Yeah. I regularly wake up to my work computer having nonconsensually rebooted overnight (closing all open applications, because who cares)
96% through recovering an attached 20tb RAID and windows update decides i should go fuck myself.
And that is why it’s only on my work laptop. And only because i’m forced at gunpoint
They force you at gunpoint at work? To use Windows???
Yes. They stuck the barrel up my butt and threaten to pull the trigger. Gonna turn me into a big polo mint.
Life savers? What the fuck is a polo mint. Ay mate is it raining cats and dogs over there?
Android ain’t no better. If I don’t pull up my app list and manually kill my media player, it doesnt stop and drains the battery despite tapping the exit menu item
Windows:
- program refuses to shutdown
- system: okay, guess you don’t need your computer to turn off anyway
There is a windows registry hack to set the shutdown wait time for 1s and that did fix it for me. But every update they turn it back to unlimited.
(I ended up installing Linux, I only have the dnf5daemon server holding the shutdown up for atnost 5min now. But I haven’t tried to fix it)
Which is why in my Windows days I got a habit of turning computer off with Windows + R --> shutdown -s -f -t 0
Windows just works, my ass :)
Such grace.
