Is there a taskManager persay in linux? ..i can see the "processes" going on by using "ps" but it doesn't show things like Firefox.. ..I've been having issues w/ FF hanging on me, but the rest of the system is fine and I just want to kill FF. I know "kill" is a command, but how does one use it? And why can't I find these sorts of answers in some sort of document? I think I'm trying to run before I walk w/ linux, but that's just how I roll.. ..and I roll dirty.

..don't get me wrong. I always search for posts before I post, but either I'm searching for the wrong "words" or I'm dumber then I think and everyone else knows the proper "slang"..

..I can weld tho. ..I'll trade ya some nice fish-scales for you teaching me how to run this goddamn OS..

You will find it in the docs, but it's another matter to find the docs you find it in

Some commands you should play around with:
and their various options; refer to man-pages, like
If you wanted to kill a process, you would find it (with ps for example) and it's process ID (pid) number. Then you would use kill with that pid, or killall with the name; kill 1234 kills the process whose ID number is 1234, and killall firefox would kill all processes who are called 'firefox'.

And so on..

EDIT: for example if you issue 'ps', the first column has numbers in it - these are the PID numbers you use with kill.

ps, kill and friends are nice if you want to use the command line. If you prefer something with a GUI, there are GUI task managers which come with Gnome and KDE, and some others too. If you want something which runs in the terminal but is a little more like a GUI app, there's top and an nice colourised version with extra options, htop. (htop is really nice IMO).

..ha! ..i've got a POS laptop I got for changing a lightswitch for some doob.. ..its lame. ..I'm using Xubuntu to get the most out of it.. ..so. from what I can see.. its XFCE that controls the desktop.. ..i don't have all the pretty little options to do thangs.. (probably would help if I did this stuff w/o a 1/5th of Bushmills next to me.. but.. ..that's just sematics..)

..do things that work for Gnome and KDE work w/ XFCE?

It's all about "dependencies"--all the library functions that any SW needs. If you install SW using your package manager, all this is handled for you---what desktop you use is transparent.

Yes. There is a widely held misconception that you can't use apps from one desktop environment while running another. This is untrue. The may be reasons why you would not want to run a KDE app under XFCE, but it should work.

The reason you might not want to do it, is that KDE apps need a lot of large libraries installed to run, and if you are trying to keep your system install size down, this is annoying... the first KDE app you install installs a whole bunch of libraries and so on.

Also, KDE apps in particular start a bunch of background processes which are used to provide integration features with the KDE desktop. These can suck up a lot of memory and other system resources, so if you're trying to keep your system nice and snappy that might be something you want to avoid.

Gnome apps do similar things, but to a lesser extent (KDE is the worst offender in this respect).

XFCE has it's own process manager program, although it is a little bit primitive: xfce4-taskmanager.

!!!!! ..I knew somewhere I'd find this.. ..this is EXACTLY what I'm trying to do. I want the thinnest yet most complete OS I can have. I will get more memory here in a few weeks, but even then, I don't want bloat. This comes back around to all the libraries and shite about apt-get.

How does one know what one needs and how does one keep all this slimed down to the very basics and still do the normal thangs?

Well, it's not really apt's fault. It's a design decision about how to arrange the system. As a matter of fact, it's not even a Linux thing really - it is quite possible to make a distro where all packages are statically linked an there are no shared libraries. This would effectively eliminate dependencies (on libraries anyhow), but there would be a penalty in terms of disk space used, and more importantly memory used at runtime.

So it's a trade off - it's either shared libraries with dependencies and a lower memory footprint and smaller installation size, or static executables, few dependencies and a big memory footprint/install size. That or something in between.

It is typical in the Linux world to accept the complexities of dependencies in order to take the advantages of using shard libraries. OSX draws the line a little more toward the static side, but not all the way - Apple have some core libraries (which they call frameworks). These are shared, but anything which doesn't come from these core frameworks tends to be statically linked. This is one reason that OSX downloads are usually bigger then Linux and Windows binaries.

Well, that's a matter of experience mainly. It's why there are distros. Anyone can roll their own system, and choose what apps to use and which to link statically etc, but it's a big undertaking. And so the people that are good at it share their designs with others by making a distribution and inviting people to use it. This is at the core of what a distro is.

For the Linux consumer then, the decision usually boils down to choosing a distribution which was made with design goals that are close to their requirements. If you want a tiny compact system with a low memory footprint, choose a distro which was designed to do that. If you want a huge clunker which does everything, use a distro which does that.

As well as (perhaps more than) the static/dynamic tradeoff, a very important decision is which desktop environment to use. I personally find XFCE a good choice for a lightweight desktop, although sometimes I like the "has everything including the kitchen sink" features of KDE. Depends on my mood and what I'm doing.

Another important decision is what apps to use. OpenOffice has a lot of features, but it's very heavy. If all you want is a word processor which does all the usual stuff, Abiword might be a better choice.

So what does this mean for you? If you have time and the patience, try multiple distributions to get a feeling for what is possible. One the lightweight end of the scale try Puppy or Damn Small Linux. On the other end of the scale try [K]Ubuntu, SuSE, Fedora and so on.

You can usually trim down the resource use of the bigger distros by choosing lighter desktop environments, apps and so on...

It used to be a SuSE thing to say, "have a lot of fun". I'm not sure if they still say that but I like it, and we should all try to remember it.

I'm going to argue that, not only is it not apt's (or rpm's) fault, but the general scheme is exactly right.

You get to decide to decide exactly how much and which stuff (aka 'shite') you download onto your system. Of course, you've got to know what you are doing to get it right, but I have no problem with that. Either, if you don't know what you are doing or don't want to be bothered, you accept the defaults of your distro. If you do want to change the defaults and can be bothered, you can do that too. I don't think this is a problem!

You also have to remember that 'bloat that you have somewhere on disk, but don't execute' really doesn't cost you anything except disk space. Its only really when you start executing things that it costs you processor cycles and/or memory.

If you are happy to go down the command line route, remember that you can combine commands. So

runs ps with the -ef options (many other options are available...) and that runs through the filter grep. In this case, grep only passes through lines with the string 'irefox' in them. I usually drop the first letter from the search string because:
-then it would match Firefox and firefox (although you could also use -i for that)
- You will probably get two matches. One for the real 'firefox' and one for the grep command itself, which has the string in it too. I find it easier not to confuse the two if one says 'irefox' and the other says 'firefox'

And, if you find yourself doing this a lot, you could make a trivial one line script that does it for you. Its a matter of choice whether you make this script with 'irefox' hard-coded into it or you invoke the script with this as a command line parameter. But, by the time you have done it, you'll find yourself thinking 'I don't want some evil megacorp deciding how I want my system. I want to arrange it in the most efficient way for me.' Possibly.

(In the interests of balance, I have to add that megacorps are not necessarily evil in all cases, and no particular evil megacorp is intended or implied. And I'm sure lawyers are nice people really, once you get to know them.)