alt Hacker NewsThe mentioned situation is not running out of memory, but being able to use memory more efficiently.
Running out of memory is a hard problem, because in some ways we still assume that computers are turing machines with an infinite tape. (And in some ways, theoretically, we have to.) But it's not clear at all which memory to free up (by killing processes).
If you are lucky, there's one giant with tens of GB of resident memory usage to kill to put your system back into a usable state, but that's not the only case.
Windows doesn't do that, though. If a process starts thrashing the performance goes to shit, but you can still operate the machine to kill it manually. Linux though? Utterly impossible. Usually even the desktop environment dies and I'm left with a blinking cursor.
What good is it to get marginally better performance under low memory pressure at the cost of having to reboot the machine under extremely high memory pressure?