An Electron app would mark its entire 2GB as required for interactivity. If you run 4 electron apps on an 8GB system you run out of memory.

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robinsonb5 12 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't mean interactivity within apps, per se - I mean the desktop and underlying OS, so that if an electron app goes unresponsive and eats all the free RAM the window manager can still kill it. Or you can still open a new terminal window, log in and kill it. Right now it can take several minutes to get a Linux system back under control once a swapstorm starts.

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SAI_Peregrinus 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Linux doesn't really have any distinction between the desktop and underlying OS components in userspace and anything else in userspace. Linux is quite userland-agnostic, and distros have traditionally mixed user software with distro-managed software. You shouldn't use `sudo` to install software by default, your package manager should allow installing software for just your user. Software installed for the system could then be the only software allowed to mark itself as required for interactivity. You could do that manually to other software if you had root access, but "normal" user software installs with the package manager couldn't do so since they wouldn't get root access.

That'd require some new capabilities added, and some substantial shifts in how distro maintainers & users operate, so it's extremely unlikely. It's much closer to how things like Android operate, though still not quite as secure as giving each application its own user & dedicated storage for data.

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M95D 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Alt+[SysRq,f]

Or Alt+[SysRq,h] for help

	▲	dingaling 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No effect, captain. In 30 years of using desktop Linux I've never been able to interrupt a swapstorm. The only way out is long-press the power button.