You are right. I wonder if it would make sense for distros to put processes that are critical for interacting with your computer in a cgroup with 0 swappiness,

You are right. I wonder if it would make sense for distros to put processes that are critical for interacting with your computer in a cgroup with 0 swappiness, so your computer remains responsive, even if some processes gets dog slow. Some candidate processes: * ssh-server * X/wayland * Desktop environments * Maybe some terminal emulators and shells? The tricky part is that you probably want at least a shell that remains responsive, but you probably don't want to set their child processes' swappiness to 0. There could be some whitelisted system utilities that are known to not consume a lot of resources, so you can list processes conveniently and kill the appropriate ones. I assume Windows also treats some processes specially so it can remain responsive, and I think now with appropriately set cgroups Linux could have the same capability.