Does it actually work?

Posted Apr 10, 2025 13:39 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Does it actually work? by intelfx
Parent article: Three ways to rework the swap subsystem

> Making *those* parts of the system usable is still a non-goal because it is fundamentally unachievable.

Why not? MacOS and Windows achieve that… somehow.

Sure, when it takes 50 minutes to compile something that can be compiled in 5 minutes without trashing… it's not good, absolutely – but it's still usable.

When the same thing takes days (not sure how many days, though, I stopped the experiment after two)… it's not usable.

You may say that it's not worth it (Apple did all that work, apparently, to claim that MBA with just 8GiB of RAM is as good as any other laptop with 16GiB of RAM), but that's something radically different from “fundamentally unachievable”.