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It has been my experience in recent weeks that 20.04 hangs much more than 16.04. The most recent incident involved editing in gedit while Firefox and a gnome-terminal were also open. Often Skype is also open but minimized or active only in the status bar. This time the mouse pointer was very lagged but usually the mouse pointer is completely unresponsive and the keyboard is also unresponsive. Usually fan noise is elevated and that suggests an infinite loop.

Until the quality of 20.04 is improved, what is a safe recovery method short of reboot via a long duration press on the power switch. (I presume this is the "modern" equivalent of the old desktop PC architecture reset momentary switch press.)

I would like to look at top and kill pid but since the keyboard is unresponsive that is not possible. Typically I do not even have a gnome-terminal to use.

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  • System "freezes" are often caused by running too many, too large programs and running out of available memory. Use free to see if you have swap space, read man mkswap swapon fstab to create some. Traditionally, swap space of 1.5 × RAM has been recommended, but YMMV.
    – waltinator
    Commented Dec 20, 2020 at 4:52
  • It appears that by default 20.04 installed on a 4GB machine will have approximately a 1GB swap space.
    – H2ONaCl
    Commented Dec 20, 2020 at 18:58
  • "will have"? But how much swap does your system have? Read man ps you can automate running ps every N seconds
    – waltinator
    Commented Dec 22, 2020 at 5:38
  • @waltinator It is the default amount of swap so about 1GB. My notes for increasing swap space say to use gparted but since I now have full disk encryption I can't seem to see any way to use gparted to increase the swap space. I will decrease swappiness to see if I prefer that and if not then I will try to increase swap space without gparted.
    – H2ONaCl
    Commented Dec 26, 2020 at 0:39
  • Setting swappiness to 0 does not solve the problem. I upgraded to 8GB RAM.
    – H2ONaCl
    Commented Feb 25, 2021 at 23:48

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