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Comment by Splines | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, is there a desktop OS that provides the same level of "multitasking" application control? I mean, sometimes I want to minimize an application and I'm not interested in it doing any work. In other words, I'd like to "freeze" it at will.

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Mac OS X Lion has a feature called "Automatic Termination" that kills background processes (that support Automatic Termination) when the system feels like it.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.a...

It's not under user control and it can be a bit wonky, but it's a sign of where Mac OS X and iOS are becoming more alike.

Very interesting thanks for sharing that. I'm not an OS X user so I didn't know about that one. As a Windows user this makes me jealous.

I've dabbled in Linux (Arch) but I'm not aware of a similar feature. Does one exist?

Take a look at http://cryopid.berlios.de/

I've never used it before, but it seems to do what you want.

Edit: You might also want to take a look at http://checkpointing.org/ as well.

On both Linux and OS X, you can 'freeze' an app by sending it the old-style unix signal SIGSTOP. I've done this before, and it sort-of-works, but it doesn't tend to play very well with GUIs. If an app has a window up when you SIGSTOP it, the window will hang until you send the app SIGCONT to continue. And under OS X, at least, if you leave an app stopped for too long it seems to make the rest of the GUI become unresponsive; so I wouldn't really recommend it. But it's something you can experiment with.

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