“Is there a task manager for Linux?” “How do you open the task manager on Linux?” “Where do I find the Ubuntu task manager?”
These are some of the most frequently asked questions from Linux beginners:
People who are coming from Windows know how valuable the task manager is. You press Ctrl+Alt+Del to get to the task manager in Windows. This task manager shows you all the running processes and their memory consumption. You can choose to end a process from this task manager application.
When you’re just starting out with Linux, you may also look for a task manager equivalent on Linux. An expert Linux user prefers the command-line way to find processes and memory consumption, etc., but you don’t have to go that way, at least not when you’re just starting out with Linux.
All the major Linux distributions have a task manager equivalent. Usually, it’s called System Monitor, but it actually depends on your Linux distribution and the desktop environment it uses.
In this article, we’ll see how to find and use the task manager on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions that use GNOME as the desktop environment.
System Monitor: The Task Manager of Linux distributions
If you’re using the GNOME desktop, press the Super key (Windows key) and look for System Monitor. In other desktop environments, search for System Monitor in the menu.
This will start the GNOME System Monitor. It shows you all the running processes and their memory consumption.
You can select a process and click on End process to kill it. You can also select multiple entries here and kill the processes in one click.
You can also see some statistics about your system in the Resources tab, such as CPU consumption per core basis, memory usage, network usage, etc.
You can watch this video to see it in action:
There are more ways to manage tasks
That was the graphical way. If you want to go the command line way, just run the top command in the terminal and you can see all the running processes and their memory consumption. You can easily kill processes in the Linux command line.
If you want a command-line-based task manager on Linux, I recommend using htop. You can see running processes, memory usage, and more, and you can easily use hotkeys to end processes. And it looks good as well.
This is all you need to know about task manager equivalents on Linux. I hope you found this quick tutorial helpful. If you have questions or suggestions, feel free to comment.
