No, there’s no proper equivalent to Ctrl-Alt-Del. It’s a major flaw in the Linux desktop. You just have to hard-reboot.
Edit: Downvotes, but you won’t get any suggestions that match Ctrl-Alt-Del. Only
- Ctrl-Alt-Fn - Disabled by default in lots of distros I think, and it doesn’t have high priority so it’s not guaranteed to respond like Ctrl-Alt-Del does.
- Magic SysRq - Zero UI, so you have to magically remember a load of random keys, and there’s no way to kill the specific offending process.
- Ctrl-alt-backspace - Brute force, kills X (does it even work on Wayland?).
Prove me wrong. Ctrl-alt-delete will respond even when the system is overloaded, and it lets me interactively see a list of processes and kill one of them. Can you do that in Linux?
Linux is never going to solve this problem while they treat the UI as “just another process”.
In security terms it’s slightly different, in that if an attacker gains access to your account they would have to do a small amount of trivial work to gain root. But yeah it makes no real difference to security. Cargo cultists would object to this but they don’t know what they’re talking about:
sudo.I think the real reason to use a normal user account and give it sudo privileges is that it prevents you accidentally hosing your system. You can’t accidentally
rm -rf /.Another reason you might not want to do it is that a fair amount of software will get pissy with you if you run it as root and tell you not to.