I get we want a magical OS that reads minds and abstracts itself from users, but these days low mem situations are technical events for people trying to optimize resources use and balance uptime.

So not being able to mark apps processes as kill me first and leave others like ssh bash up is a missing feature.

Shouldn't the os have a bunch of auto hooks to invoke for machines under duress? Yes you might be able to do it in userspace but .. userspace will probably get unpredictability nuked in stress situations.

The WMs should have a "freeze all apps desktop except this one shell window" mode. Didn't NeXT have that?

Having some swap basically required has always seemed like a smell. A legacy from the 640k oops wasn't enough days. I can see emergency memory swap system as a feature, which it currently isn't...

> So not being able to mark apps processes as kill me first and leave others like ssh bash up is a missing feature.

systemd OOMScoreAdjust has existed for at least a decade. /proc/*/oom_adj since Linux kernel 2.6.11 - two decades. cgroups are also two decades old. SSH by default has OOMScoreAdjust=-1000 and is entirely protected from OOM.