How should I proceed if Steam stops responding?

[Myon ♥]

Hello everyone.
Before anything else, I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

I was watching some trailers on Steam in fullscreen, when the program stopped to respond.
I tried everything, but I coudn't exit the program normally, so I had to use the System Monitor.

I'm still used to the Task Manager from Windows, so I saw 2 different "Steam" applications (one with ~5MB and another with ~70MB), and by killing the second one Steam closed, but the fullscreen window was still there (was being used to the trailer), so I had to restart the PC in order to eliminate it.


I'm asking: Is this the best way to terminate the Steam program when It's not responding?

Also, when you try to kill a program with System monitor, a window appears with:

"Ending a process may destroy data, break the session or introduce a security risk. Only unresponsive processes should be ended".

So, by killing the Steam process, is there any type of security risk (Or anything like breaking the session)?


Thank you guys for helping me.

[Toquita]

No security risk AFAIC.

To kill steam:

pkill -9 steam

[poltsy]

It's a boilerplate warning. Killing a process forces it to exit immediately without allowing it to clean up after itself. It might leave a database in an inconsistent state or leave some lock files behind etc. The warning is just there to make sure you understand SIGKILL is not the proper way to exit a program.

However if an application is stuck then it's stuck, nothing you can do but kill it and rebooting does the exact same thing.

Next time a window gets stuck and you can't figure out which process it belongs to try hit ctrl-alt-esc and click the window.

[Myon ♥]

Originally posted by poltsy:

It's a boilerplate warning. Killing a process forces it to exit immediately without allowing it to clean up after itself. It might leave a database in an inconsistent state or leave some lock files behind etc. The warning is just there to make sure you understand SIGKILL is not the proper way to exit a program.

However if an application is stuck then it's stuck, nothing you can do but kill it and rebooting does the exact same thing.

Next time a window gets stuck and you can't figure out which process it belongs to try hit ctrl-alt-esc and click the window.

Thank you for the answer.
So, there's no problem (like security ones) if I close Steam when it freezes, right? (like what [Linux] Junior s2 Camila said).

[Dusk of Oolacile]

The best thing you can do is not using Steam as a web browser. Use Firefox or Chrome for this kind of stuff, Steam browser is worse and more unstable than Internet Explorer.

[Kranky K. Krackpot]

Originally posted by avL | Aikawa Kizuna ♥:

Originally posted by poltsy:

It's a boilerplate warning. Killing a process forces it to exit immediately without allowing it to clean up after itself. It might leave a database in an inconsistent state or leave some lock files behind etc. The warning is just there to make sure you understand SIGKILL is not the proper way to exit a program.

However if an application is stuck then it's stuck, nothing you can do but kill it and rebooting does the exact same thing.

Next time a window gets stuck and you can't figure out which process it belongs to try hit ctrl-alt-esc and click the window.

Thank you for the answer.
So, there's no problem (like security ones) if I close Steam when it freezes, right? (like what [Linux] Junior s2 Camila said).

No, there's none, at least, none you should worry about.
You can first try "pkill steam", that will politely ask steam to terminate itself, and if it doesn't work out, try "pkill -9 steam" which will kill steam immidiately.

And I'm second for not using steam's build-in browser for anything.

[Myon ♥]

Originally posted by Dusk of Oolacile:

The best thing you can do is not using Steam as a web browser. Use Firefox or Chrome for this kind of stuff, Steam browser is worse and more unstable than Internet Explorer.

Good to know that. Thank you for the information. I didn't knew that it was that unstable.

Originally posted by Lord Battlesheep:

Originally posted by avL | Aikawa Kizuna ♥:

Thank you for the answer.
So, there's no problem (like security ones) if I close Steam when it freezes, right? (like what [Linux] Junior s2 Camila said).

No, there's none, at least, none you should worry about.
You can first try "pkill steam", that will politely ask steam to terminate itself, and if it doesn't work out, try "pkill -9 steam" which will kill steam immidiately.

And I'm second for not using steam's build-in browser for anything.

Thank you for telling me those extra commands (thank you too, [Linux] Junior s2 Camila).

[Dusk of Oolacile]

Originally posted by avL | Aikawa Kizuna ♥:

Good to know that. Thank you for the information. I didn't knew that it was that unstable.

It is. Even the more mature windows version can be completely freaked out by simple things like maximizing a youtube video etc. Just avoid it if you can.