Restart Ubuntu GUI

Every now and then my GUI locks up and becomes unresponsive. This is usually shown by something like compiz eating 100% CPU usage in htop when I SSH in.

The easiest way to resolve this is to run this command to restart the lightdm service which handles the GUI. Note that you will be taken back to the login screen.

sudo service lightdm restart

References

• Ask Ubuntu - Restart Only GUI Session Or Restart Only Operating System?