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0 pointsred75prime5y ago0 comments

1. Swap thrashing can bring the system into a completely unresponsive state.

2. Linux servers are targeted and breached. Linux desktop share is too small to be worth it (yet).

3. Windows updates aren't stealthy for a considerable time.

4. That's a matter of opinion.

5. Some distros do, but it's opt-in. Transparency is better on the Linux side too. I agree on this point.

6. You are tempted to spend time on customization with unclear objective benefits.

7. Developers don't owe you anything.

0 comments

mrob5y ago

>1. Swap thrashing can bring the system into a completely unresponsive state.

This can be prevented using earlyoom (which is packaged in most distros):

https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom

It's probably too difficult to fix the underlying design errors, e.g. fork() duplicating the process's entire address space, thus requiring overcommit and copy-on-write, but losing only one process beats losing all of them. earlyoom should be enabled by default.

pmontra5y ago

Or simply disable swap if you have enough RAM. I've been running without swap since 2014 on a 16 GB laptop. I upgraded to 32 GB a couple of years later when I started to routinely use at least 12 GB. At least one browser and editor window per virtual desktop (one VD per customer plus a couple for me), docker, virtualbox, slack, thunderbird, etc.

yankcrime5y ago

Don't do this. Disabling swap is bad idea: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html

2 more replies

account425y ago

You can still have thrashing without a swap partition/file: as memory pressure increases, the kernel will flush disk cache and buffers, slowing down operations that need them again. In the extreme case this can mean the program code you are executing being evicted from ram only to be re-read page by page for many times until the kernel finally decides to kill whatever was eating all the ram.

extra_rice5y ago

> 2. Linux servers are targeted and breached. Linux desktop share is too small to be worth it (yet).

Why aren't we replacing them with something better then? Why are most servers still running GNU/Linux?

Osiris5y ago

Linux as a server/headless OS has been fantastic for me. I have a home NAS running Linux that hasn't been rebooted in over a year and that was due to swapping out hard drives.

Linux as my desktop OS, not so much. I have to reboot my Linux laptop every few days for various reasons, including complete unresponsiveness to any keyboard input.

the_af5y ago

That's really weird. Which distro and hardware are you using? I can go months without rebooting. I mostly do so when Linux tells me it needs a reboot to apply some update.

Keep in mind I use my laptop for both coding and gaming (if it ever locks up it's because of a game -- which wasn't uncommon years ago when I used Windows, either).

blockmeifyoucan5y ago

Run a memtest86 and keep an eye on the temps during usage. This is not normal.

Are you running nvidia drivers?

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