Long-time users of Ubuntu might recall that a handy ‘Force Quit’ applet was once available to add to the desktop panel, which made ‘closing’ misbehaving applications a cinch.
With the move to Unity and GNOME 3 these old school ‘GNOME Applets’ were retired and force-quitting applications required a different approach (ALT+F2 > xkill > click on Window).
Thankfully for the lazy amongst us reader Josh Leverette has put together a script that adds a ‘Force Close’ button to the Unity Launcher. With one click you can once again kill crashy, CPU-hogging applications without having to reboot or revert to the Terminal.
The script can be downloaded by hitting the button below.
Install
To install the applet simply extract the archive you downloaded above, enter the ‘ForceQuit’ folder that results, and double click on the ‘install.sh’ file inside. Choose ‘Run’ when prompted and enter your password to install the applet. Once done you just need to drag and drop the applet to the Unity Launcher.
