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    that's a tough question because you're not giving us much to go on... if it were me i would CTRL+ALT+F[1..6], login, and kill some processes. but i almost always know what's making my machine unresponsive, whereas you don't. and additionally, sometimes i write programs that i know are going to make it unresponsive, because i want the program's output. Commented Jun 1, 2012 at 22:59
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    Are you sure the system gets unresponsive, or is the system still working but the input devices stop functioning? Commented Jun 2, 2012 at 15:53
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    Related (on Ask Ubuntu): What should I do when Ubuntu freezes? Commented Sep 9, 2017 at 20:06
  • This happened to me a few times. I was all set to hard reset, but just pressing the power button once unfroze the system. No idea what was going on but it did unfreeze. Commented Dec 19, 2019 at 4:27
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    In my case, it becomes completely unresponsive. Even numluck or capslock keyboard light doesn't toggle. None of the below works. Only option is to press reboot. Ubuntu 20.04 fully updated. Last entry in syslog has to do with canonical-livepatch. Commented Nov 17, 2020 at 15:54