The only times I have ever wanted to freeze an application it was for the purpose of it not hogging CPU time in favor of some interactive program, and had no be

The only times I have ever wanted to freeze an application it was for the purpose of it not hogging CPU time in favor of some interactive program, and had no better way of doing that. On Linux, the Con Kolivas MuQSS CPU scheduler introduces a new scheduling policy called SCHED_IDLEPRIO which runs a program only if there is absolutely nothing else to run. It is perfect for long-running programs that don't need interactive performance. EDIT: The example given in this article is also IMO better solved by using SCHED_IDLEPRIO >Other example may be some heavy processing. For example you started RawTherapee or Darktable processing of large amount of photos and you are not able to smoothly watch a video. Just pause it, watch the video and unpause it again to finish its work.