Compiz crashing takes Ubuntu with it

Question

I am somewhat new to Ubuntu. I want to like it, I really do. I came from the world of KDE where Kwin is the windows manager. Kwin is awesome for many reasons, one being that if a window or application misbehaves, you can simply kill it with a simple hot key. My experiences with Compiz is, if a window misbhaves, that's it; it's over. You can't simply switch workspaces and kill the window, you can't strike a hotkey to kill the window, you can't even ctrl-alt F2 to get into the terminal.

This cannot be the way it was designed; I must be doing something wrong. How on earth can Ubuntu or Compiz allow sone simple misbehaving window to bring down the entire operating system?

Answer 1

Did you try using the System Monitor to force kill the window's process? That usually gets rid of pesky windows that hang and don't want to close without crashing Ubuntu's compiz(well at least in my experience of windows not behaving properly).

Also from experience I have Cairo Dock installed and if you have it's terminal(the one that pops up that's connected to the dock when opened) on the dock I found you can still use it's terminal even at times when you cant use your desktop environment's terminal which has saved me at times when I thought my Ubuntu's installation was ruined. Anyways if you have Cairo Dock installed, you should from it's terminal run the line(without quotes):

"compiz --replace"

This restarts compiz when undesirable things occur like when it hangs or crashes.