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
> Linux starts trashing

You mean intensive use of swap memory? You could turn off swap and get OOM errors instead if you like a snappy system, but I don't know if it's fair to criticize an OS for running out of memory. It's the user fault for using software that demands more resources than the equipment has, or for not expanding the RAM when it's clearly needed.

>>ASalaz+k7
I've experienced this too. Swapping seems very slow and inefficient on Linux. No matter how large your swap is, once you hit the point where you're using twice your physical RAM, the system become unresponsive. My guess is Linux doesn't prioritize processes properly for desktop use, and background threads, despite being from minimized windows (minimized by the user in a desperate and futile attempt to open a terminal so I can kill some processes), are free to demand memory with the same priority as everything else.