Processes, also known as daemons, are programs that run on your system in the background, providing a service or allowing a particular function to work. In order to view how running processes affect your system, you can use Mint's System Monitor or the top command to get a look at what's running on your system. Most likely, you will not know what the majority of them are for, and this is okay, since you're not expected to. However, if your system starts running slowly or your system's temperature starts increasing (which you'll recognize by the increasing speed of the system's fan), a running process may be to blame. If you see a process using 100 percent of your CPU, there's a good chance that it may be to blame for sluggish performance.

Developers do their best to make sure that the programs and daemons don't negatively impact the system, but the unfortunate reality is that bugs can and do sometimes happen. This is not even specific to Linux, as sometimes, bugs may affect...