For reference, [1] describes the SSD near-OOM thrash problem, where the speed of refaulting file pages is so high that the kernel detects enough activity and doesn't trigger OOM.

It's a heck of a problem to deal with, and a OOM killer will go part of the way to fixing it, but I still have two complaints about the thrash problem.

1. In similar situations on other operating systems, I don't usually see the GUI freeze to an unusable state. In Linux hitting a thrash situation will freeze the computer to the point where Ctrl-Alt-F2 will not switch the vterm even when waiting several minutes, and it has to be rebooted. I suppose it's possible that I just haven't used other OSes enough in a long time and they have this too, but this seems like a solvable problem. I assume it's not a CPU issue, since the scheduler should handle that just fine. So why not have a mechanism by which the user's desktop environment and init / login system can reserve itself enough memory to always be responsive under any memory condition?

2. Browsers. The state of browser memory management is atrocious. Just about every time I've run out of memory (other than compiling some complex software with -O3) it's been because my browser is hogging a huge chunk of it (even if the OOM killer blames something else). Now, I understand that in theory unused memory is wasted memory. So a browser using a ton of memory can be a good thing. But this is only true when memory the browser is holding but not using can be reclaimed to be used by another program, and this seems to basically never happen. If I close and reopen the browser (with the tabs automatically restored) the memory usage drops by 80% or more; the issue is that the browser simply never suspends tabs I haven't used in days or weeks. Modern browsers are not good "desktop citizens", if you will. They hog memory to the point where opening anything new will create a pressure stall.

I suspect solving these two issues would largely fix thrashing for most desktop users, without the need to ever kill anything, which is obviously undesirable.

Feel free to tell me if one or both of these is incorrect or impossible. These are just my observations, I'm not a kernel dev or anything close to one.