Re: Linux desktop performance under extreme memory and CPU pressure

totally.  good points.  agrees with my experience.  i happily help folks
that are interested in linux, but i rarely find myself convincing someone
to be interested in linux.

i've tried several distros, and on my desktop i keep returning to lubuntu
as the best compromise, quite lightweight, things mostly just work, and the
ubuntu repos have a true wealth of stuff.  i often even find myself using
the lxde or lxqt ui, usually just to see if some odd behavior i'm
encountering is different there.  but you've struck a bullseye into the top
reason i use...twm.  what the heck here's my whole list of reasons:

   - tiny footprint (swaps in right away even under heavy thrashing),
   - keyboard focus not stolen when windows or popups appear (doesn't
   anybody else ever type?  boggles my mind this feature is rarely found
   elsewhere.  i can't stand popups getting dismissed by what i was typing
   before i even got to see them!),
   - can place active window icons anywhere on the desktop (usually i slide
   them mostly off an edge where they occupy no space and are easy to click)
   - no superfluous taskbars wasting precious space,
   - trim titlebars (not very tall and not the whole window width, i even
   ditch the titlebar buttons & configure the functionality into mouse or
   keyboard actions anywhere on the titlebar or window),
   - can slide a window so parts of it are off screen in any direction and
   then stretch it to fill the screen with the part i want to see,
   - vert zoom, horiz zoom, left zoom, right zoom, top zoom, bottom zoom,
   full zoom,
   - keystroke & mouseclick actions all configurable (ugly by default, but
   reasonable with a modest twmrc),
   - i have bouts where i go trying the others, but after all these decades
   twm's features still have not been usurped.

i'll happily share my twmrc with anyone interested.

and there's a fair bit more to making myself happy with lubuntu, eg purging
various packages that launch forever running daemons i have no use for.


On Sat, Jul 25, 2020 at 1:49 PM Haudy Kazemi <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am splitting this topic off from the other thread, hoping that someone
> has a solution or recommendations.
>
> My experience with Android and Windows is they both do a very good job in
> dealing with processes that become very memory or CPU hungry. The systems
> tend to stay responsive (may lag slightly, but usable), and recoverable
> (task managers can still be brought up), even under extreme memory and CPU
> pressure.
>
> I have yet to find a desktop Linux distro that can do nearly as well.
> Chrome and Firefox both easily get into 100% CPU usage and high memory
> usage situations on desktop Linux, resulting in nonresponsive systems, that
> I don't experience on Android or Windows. These situations are easy enough
> to hit that even novice users can experience them with only a handful of
> open tabs, depending on the sites open. (On the exact same hardware,
> Windows can run the same browser with the same or even more tabs and
> survive). With these problems, I find it hard to recommend Linux as a
> general purpose desktop OS to others or even use it as my own desktop as my
> daily driver. Linux seems to do okay when the upper bounds of the loads are
> well-defined and easily fit within the available resources.
>
> Does anyone know of a distro that does as good as a job at maintaining
> resource control and desktop responsiveness under heavy load as Android or
> Windows? I would love to hear about it.
>
> Thanks,
>
> -hk
>
> P.S. a relevant article, "Yes, Linux Does Bad In Low RAM / Memory Pressure
> Situations On The Desktop"
> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Does-Bad-Low-RAM
>
> P.P.S. It appears that Android uses pressure stall information (PSI) to
> mitigate these problems per post
> https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/general-discussion/1118164-yes-linux-does-bad-in-low-ram-memory-pressure-situations-on-the-desktop?p=1118174#post1118174
>

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