zlacker

>>tonyst+(OP)
Linux still can't handle out of memory issues gracefully.

Sometimes I create memory leaks or use too many electron apps and when you hit a low memory situation Linux starts trashing and your system becomes unusable for minutes to hours unless you reboot your machine.

Mac and windows both manage to handle this gracefully by force suspending background processes it seems.

This makes Linux on the laptop hit or miss, multitask too much and your system effectively locks up. Laptops tend to have less ram available.

>>admax8+w5
Depends on your configuration/distro. OOM killers aren't really used on the desktop because swap makes more sense, but you can certainly add one if you're using a resource-constrained machine.

>>smolde+T5
OOM killer is a pseudosolution to an artificially created problem.

https://lwn.net/Articles/104185/

>>yakubi+P6
Then don't use it. Most distributors don't enable it by default for a reason.

>>smolde+49
> Most distributors don't enable it by default for a reason.

Every Linux system configured for overcommit (every major distribution out of the box) will invoke the kernel OOM killer upon demand. There is no such thing as distributions not "enabling" this thing. You're talking about things like systemd-oomd, which act as a layer on top of the kernel OOM killer.