My point was that as a new user the default experience is unfriendly and saying that I have to understand the nuance between different ram related packages in order to talk about it is just proving my point.
I'm not saying that a new user should need to understand the nuance, I'm questioning whether your understanding of the underlying problem is accurate. I do agree that it's a poor experience for the system to freeze up under excess memory pressure, I just think the correct fix is less swap combined with earlyoom.
Gah I am so tired of explaining this in this thread: As the system begins running out of memory, it starts using more of the zram. The zram is compressed which uses CPU and slows the system down enough to notice it during which time I notice and begin closing apps. The alternative, without zram, is it's super fast right until I run out of memory then bam my whole system locks up. Zram also effectively makes the total available ram larger because zram swap is actually useable whereas swap to disk is so slow the system basically locks up when you start depending on it as if it were ram. Just try it dammit! It takes a few mins to set up and open enough stuff to see the effects.
