KDE: Freezing in Style
One of the the less apparent omissions in Plasma’s Wayland session compared to X was the lack of a prompt for terminating an unresponsive app. Of course, you should never see one because any decent app will just crash and quit rather than get stuck. Nevertheless, over the course of three evenings I spent way too much time making the “KWin Killer Helper” work on Wayland and while at it revamped its user interface entirely.
It’s always fun to add your copyright from 2023 to a file with “© 2003” at the top. Times were surely different back then and what was considered good user interface design, too. The prompt for terminating an app is actually a separate executable since under X KWin isn’t really designed to open windows by itself and even under Wayland it’s tough. The helper might also use KAuth to end a privileged process. Being an external process, however, poses some challenges under Wayland because unlike X, it actually has some notion of security, and thus no random client can just mess with another one.