I made the switch a few years ago mostly because the only thing I do on computers is write software for the companies I work for; I don’t game, I try but idk just feels like work.

Everything is mostly fine on Linux, minus things like display drivers (pick the wrong nvidia driver and you’ll have crashes), power management (honestly I just use a remote switch to turn off my displays), and random stuff like my gnome classic shell will nearly always crash the moment I try to resume working after a few hours (just kicks me back to the login screen).

But sometimes I go back to windows and I am taken aback as the sheer completeness of the user experience.

Also Linux always hangs hard if I run it out of ram. Windows never does that.

Not going back anytime soon either way.

▲ 3eb7988a1663 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

As usual, prepare for Linux suggestions to the papercuts, but...

I use a program called earlyoom. It will monitor RAM and if you cross a level of utilization (default 95%?) it will kill the worst offenders before the system becomes unresponsive. You can layer on sophistication like protecting certain programs or preferring killing others. I find it invaluable when I am doing data science work and do something stupid which explodes in memory. Annoying that something was killed, but usually better than hosing the entire system -if it crossed 95% it was almost certainly going to hit 100%.

For my purposes it works perfectly - only the Python process will be killed, my IDE or notebook will survive.

	▲	cocoto 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you so much for proposing earlyoom, that is exactly what I needed!

▲ baq 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Default vfs and vm swap related settings are good for I dunno, 1997.

You have to set swappiness to something like 1 or maybe 10, reduce cache pressure to like 50ish and set dirty ratios/bytes to something reasonable (say around 1GB, half of that for background).

If you keep defaults the system will have too much in caches and they may not be able to flush under memory and swap pressure => hang.

It’s actually amazing you need to tweak any of it to get sane behavior. Other OSes do a much better job at good defaults.

▲ godelski 3 days ago | parent [-]

  > It’s actually amazing you need to tweak any of it to get sane behavior.

I think this is because for the most part people aren't running out of memory and swap. Makes sense for devs, but devs also usually have more memory (and consequently more swap too). Often an easier solution is just adding more swap or buying more RAM. I mean if you're running out of swap and RAM then you're problem is fundamentally related to trying to do things your system isn't capable of. Though, that doesn't mean it shouldn't fail more gracefully...

▲ j_w 2 days ago | parent [-]

Swap is really interesting. The idea of swap sounds super useful - you get more RAM than you have. The reality is that RAM speeds are so important to fast computing that once you start to need swap, what you really need is more RAM on your machine.

If somebody told me they were running into issues with swap on linux I would ask them why they don't just get more RAM. I'm currently running 32GB and have never used swap on this machine. That includes gaming and local LLM usage (which my GPU does not have enough VRAM for, so normal RAM gets involved).

▲ baq 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Swap is not 'super slow extra memory' (well it is, but that's not useful!), it's a place to temporarily store contents of memory for things less important than what wants to be in fast memory right now. Idle apps can (and are) swapped out to have more file cache even on boxes with large RAM. Memory can also be fragmented and you'll have nominally lots of free space, but in reality allocations will fail; in this case, swap can be used to defragment memory instead of OOM killing stuff.

You always want some swap, even if it's 1GB for a 96GB machine.

▲ godelski 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I think you really are misunderstanding what swap is for.

If your speeds matter, you, and I cannot stress this enough BUY MORE RAM[0]. It's called "swap" not "RAM" so anyone trying to tell you it is "more RAM" is lying to you or woefully naive. It would be as idiotic as having no swap space.

Swap is a cache. Swap will actually help your RAM be even faster! Go look at your RAM usage in a bit more detail. You get a little from using a tool like `htop` but you'll get more from just `cat /proc/meminfo` or `free -wh`. You RAM has tiers of memory inside of it, all RAM is not equal. You should see that some is compressed and a lot is cached. (`/proc/meminfo` will show you there's a whole lot more to this than just "RAM and swap")

I'll put it this way. My machine has 64G of RAM on it and ~9G of swap. Currently the system (rebooted yesterday) is using about 8G of RAM and 200M of swap. Except that's actually a lie, that's what htop tells us. In fact, we need to check from `free`. Of my 62Gi of RAM: 8Gi is used, 7Gi is free, 1Gi is shared, 3Gi is in buffers, 45Gi is cached and 54Gi is available. (Swap is identical: 200M) When my system is running longer, that swap isn't so minimal anymore. Things get paged into it despite having tons of RAM available. This isn't because the OS is dumb, it is because the OS is smart.

The only reason to not have swap is because you really really care about a trivial amount of disk space. But man, disk is cheaper than RAM and these days you're probably using NVMe or at least an SSD.

What you should do:

  - Follow the instructions from [1] or elsewhere[2] and get yourself at least 4G of swap but I would do 8. Are you really going to miss 8G of disk space?
  - Change the swappiness value[2]. Set it to 10 to get pretty similar results to what you have but without crashes.
  - Read more about what swap files actually are because you are currently giving a strong impression that you have vastly oversimplified how a computer's memory system works.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45008336

[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq

[2] https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...

[3] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap#Swappiness

▲ j_w a day ago | parent [-]

I definitely don't misunderstand what swap is for. I've implemented swap for a hobby os.

Swap is absolutely "more RAM" in layman's terms. If you NEED 10GB of memory to have open everything you want on your machine, but you only have 8GB of RAM, swap will make that happen for you. Now ideally the OS is using this for inactive pages (those programs you have open but you aren't actually using), and the nuance to how swap can be used to make the RAM you do have more effective is an interesting attribute of swap (another commenter mentioned swap being used as temporary storage to defrag the physical memory), but every single reference you linked says the same thing - swap is for when you need more memory than you have physical memory for.

	▲	godelski 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		`> I definitely don't misunderstand what swap is for. > Swap is absolutely "more RAM" in layman's terms.` Okay

▲ beeflet 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Also Linux always hangs hard if I run it out of ram

disable swap. Programs will crash instead, which may be more useful.

▲

justsomehnguy 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Uhm, no.

Anything what would request memory would just outright die, including even the most basic services.

Source: actually had a system without swap what would just die running `dnf update`. Or quietly die in a week or so if left unattended.

▲

SoftTalker 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Swap isn’t unlimited, it just delays the inevitable and makes everything slow while doing it. A 4GB swap partition isn’t going to save you if you run your 32GB computer out of memory.

	▲	justsomehnguy 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Who the hell would set 4Gb swap for a 32Gb RAM machine in 2025? A guy with a decade old 64Gb SSD as the only drive in the system? > and makes everything slow while doing it It was so when the OS was on a HDD. Nowadays it's a PCIe device with 1 million IOPS. And five years ago fans of some fruit company run around singing praises on how good their brand new laptops worked with a mere 8Gb of RAM.
	▲	baq 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It does help. It gives time for the kernel in this situation and also helps in general by allowing to defragment memory. You want to keep a small amount of swap space at all times.

▲

beeflet 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Unless it's some sort of autonomous safety-related process, It's usually better for the process to die so I can just restart it.

Even if it was some sort of safety-related process that had to keep running no matter what, I would probably try to define/control the memory usage better so it wouldn't unexpectedly run orders of magnitude slower.

▲

malfist 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Programs, including the kernel

	▲	beeflet 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I've never had that happen. It usually just kills user-space programs

▲ godelski 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

  >  I don’t game, I try but idk just feels like work.

I'm surprised by this. Valve has really made this easy these days. I switched to EndervourOS a few years back and things, for the most part, just works. 2-3 years ago the biggest hurdle was changing Proton version and 90% of the time I could play a game. For the last year (including after a reinstall and having never touched Steam settings) the only problems I've had are post an update and solved by restarting the computer.

  > pick the wrong nvidia driver and you’ll have crashes

Same thing here. The only issue I can think of in the last few years was an update where a rollback solved it. The problem was only because Endeavour (Arch based) uses beta nvidia drivers AND the newest kernels. Was a really easy fix. Just two commands to roll back kernel and driver.

  > Also Linux always hangs hard if I run it out of ram. Windows never does that.

This sounds like there might be a swap space allocation issue. Did you manually set swap or just go with the default configuration? If the OS runs out of RAM and swap (there's overcommit_memory but you probably don't want to enable it[0]) then yeah, you'll run into trouble. Not sure how Windows is handling that but there's only so much that can be done here. Luckily you can always add more swap space, if you don't want to buy more RAM. But things should never crash just because you ran out of RAM (there are exceptions, like a single program using all the RAM).

  > But sometimes I go back to windows and I am taken aback as the sheer completeness of the user experience.

You might like KDE[1]. It has a much more Windows like feel. Or Cutefish[2] for that OSX feel. It is pretty simple to make a switch (given you're comfortable with software I assume calling a few lines from the CLI doesn't scare you). Just some food for though. Personally I hate Gnome. Ugly as hell and unintuitive. I'd rather go headless than use Gnome.

[0] https://serverfault.com/questions/606185/how-does-vm-overcom...

[1] https://kde.org/plasma-desktop/

[2] https://cutefish-ubuntu.github.io/

▲

paulannesley 2 days ago | parent [-]

> > I don’t game, I try but idk just feels like work. > > I'm surprised by this [...] for the most part, just works

I read that as “playing computer games feels like work” rather than “getting games running feels like work”.

	▲	godelski 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Ah that makes sense. Thanks! I'm not sure why your quotes got mangled. Maybe it was because when I quote I use two leading spaces? I do that because it makes text verbatim but I think the indentation just helps distinguish the quote better than the > alone. There's also this one that I always forget <https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc>

▲ bar000n 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Ubuntu 22.04 user here. Indeed it hangs when out of memory, never had the time to properly address this but i will try to follow the advice provided here in the thread. My servers that run Centos or Debian just do this thing called OOMkill on a ram hungry process, out of the box.