Even for the newest Ubuntu, even on memory rich high end systems sporting fast SSD drives, the system can be driven into long time swapping state with unresponsiveness (jerky mouse movements or no movement at all, no reaction to clicks and keypresses) easily by naive everyday operations. The state may last for hours depending on the applications behaviour, only workaround is to pull the plug. This is akward. Many users often have a quite messy desktop with several applications opened at once, hence a large risk of data loss if the system has to be restarted in an unresponsive condition.
This should not be blamed on bad behaveing applications alone, as there are a lot of naive applications around, and it is not the right of some desktop application to bring down the whole system.
Some example "mistakes" a "naive" user may do, the list may be easily extended endless:
-Open an oversized image or a long list of images in Gimp
-Mark an entire column in Libreoffice Calc and fill down with some complex formula
-Open a long collection of PDFs at once
-Accidently open some large ASCII database- or log file with Libreoffice Writer
-Pull up interactive sliders in Blender related to detail refinements
-...
I guess it is not easy to work around, but the current state is unbearable in my opinion.
This may also have security implications, as unresponsiveness prevent manual entering of screen locks, shotdown or standby, which may leave the machine unlocked, if the user leaves the unresponsive machine and it then recovers.
Anyone know about the state-of-the-art relating this problems on Windows or MacOSX ?