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Comment by stillpointlab | Hacker News Reader

> how else do you expect it to work

How does it work on Windows and MacOS where I don't get the same freezes and random programs aren't killed by the OS? Because I'd expect it to work like that.

There is this false dichotomy, a black and white kind of thinking on display.

> And I really doubt you mean to say that Windows is _more RAM efficient_ than Linux

What I'm saying ought to be clear to anyone willing to listen. My system should not get into an unrecoverable freezing state when I am doing routine tasks on a fresh install of an OS. And the community that is supposed to champion this OS should not then shift the blame to me if I complain about it.

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"How does it work on Windows[..]"

This video from Mark Russinovich is a classic explaining it. It is old but still relevant.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AjTl53I_qzY&ra=m

"My system should not get into an unrecoverable freezing state[..]"

There is a good precedent for what you want: Safety critical embedded systems. Your car ECU should not be in an unrecoverable freezing state when you want to break.

These embedded systems also are known to be terribly memory inefficient because every bit of memory is statically assigned and never reused.

So, it is not that what you want is impossible, it's just wasteful and expensive.

Linux and Windows sit on slightly different points on this spectrum (opposite of said embedded systems) and what you perceive as Windows' better behavior under memory pressure has a price too.

and killing programs and/or freezing the OS is somehow more efficient? By what metric? Certainly not by any UX or productivity one.

I've moved to Linux from Windows some years ago but the first thing that shocked me was precisely the abysmal performance around low memory availability.

Got my system stabilized eventually by means of some magical incantations but this wasn't a pleasant experience and I wouldn't want to repeat it.

It's beyond me how come Linux is so decrepid in this particular area compared to Windows.

I get memory related freezes on macOS all the time.

And back when I was forced into running Windows, I used to get memory-related freezes daily. Literally daily.

So I’m really not convinced the situation is drastically different there. I mean if it were that simple, Linux would have fixed it already.

Windows makes you miserable when low on RAM. Linux makes you miserable when you get out of RAM.

Yeah I got MacOS freezes sometimes - never checked Activity Monitor to see why though.

On Windows it's usually the hard drive being over-used that makes things drag for me.

Yeah, Windows file system backend is highly object oriented and has a bunch of event driven hooks. Which is great for supporting tools like antivirus. But terrible for lots of small random writes (on area Linux and most UNIX systems excel at).

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