Theo Pepler

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HOWTO: RESTART GNOME DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT FROM A REMOTE TERMINAL VIA COMMAND LINE

Sometimes the Gnome shell on Ubuntu might freeze or become unresponsive. If there are background processes running on the computer and you do not want to reboot the machine to restart the desktop environment, try the following:

1. Log into the unresponsive machine from a remote terminal.
2. Run the command:
   
   killall -1 gnome-shell

Source: Post on StackExchange.