Well, it doesn't help that when grandma calls and asks whether you have room for more stuff, the Linux kernel responds on your behalf, "Yes, of course I have ro

Well, it doesn't help that when grandma calls and asks whether you have room for more stuff, the Linux kernel responds on your behalf, "Yes, of course I have room. I live in a TARDIS." And you then do all driving to the self-storage facility to maintain the illusion as long as you can. I really don't like overcommit. Anyway, I agree with you that this behavior is annoying, but I think it ought to be possible to fix it (e.g., with memory cgroups or something like Android's lmkd) without giving up on the idea of spilling infrequently-accessed private dirty pages to disk.