When searching for how to shutdown a process usually the first result is 'kill' which requires a PID. Should the System Monitor show this information by default? I think that newbies would be searching for this ID (before learning about 'pkill')
Seems weird to be in a terminal window, type `kill`, open a graphical app, find the PID, remember the PID, go back to your terminal window, manually type in the PID, and then hit Return. If you're already in the terminal, you should use `ps -e | grep <thing>` or some other method to find the PID. If you want to use a graphical app like System Monitor, you don't need to use a terminal at all; just click on the process and click "End Process" in the toolbar.
I'll be honest with you, I'm not going to remember the `ps -e | grep <thing>' unless I had to use it daily. Finding stuff through the UI is much more intuitive, especially having the foreknowledge of Windows. That's why I would open the System Monitor to look for the PID. The reason that I would have to use the terminal is that there are times when the "End Process" or "Send Signal -> Kill" does not work in System Monitor and you have to revert to the terminal to shut it down. Again, I'm just describing my experience coming from Windows. If the column was made default it would have saved time searching how to shut down the process. Also it seems pretty relevant to the 'Processes' page to list the process ID.
> The reason that I would have to use the terminal is that there are times when the "End Process" > or "Send Signal -> Kill" does not work in System Monitor and you have to revert to the terminal to > shut it down. Aha, the truth comes out! :) I find that people often request things like this to work around bugs. But really, we should fix the bugs instead! Since this bug report is already a bit cluttered with the discussion of other things, could you file a new one about the those features not working with 100% reliability?
I got ya. I'll hold off on submitting the bug until I run into it again. Still though, process page... should list the PID, it makes sense.
Use case for seeing PID in UI: Check whether a process with a given name keeps running uninterrupted or it restartes every few seconds. If the PID changes, that's a sign the process restarted.
That's "start time" with extra steps.
> That's "start time" with extra steps. 1. This bug is about enabling PID by default. "start time" isn't enabled by default either, so the use case I described at least requires significant effort to reconfigure the columns. 2. "start time" doesn't really support the use case "check if process restarts" because its display is rounded to a full minute. One can only tell if a process has restarted within the past minute, but it's still unknown if it restarts every 30 seconds or every 1 second. 3. It wasn't obvious to me a "start time" column even exists. I guess that means it might not be obvious to others too. It's also not a common approach to fulfill the use case: I'm used to seeing PID in a system monitor (be it top, htop or ksysguard), therefore my knee jerk reaction is to solve the problem the same way in plasma-systemmonitor too. Sort of "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail", but one shouldn't penalize the users for their habits.