Make 'app-autoclosing-on-OOM' optional [answered]

asked 2015-02-13 23:09:50 +0200

ScumCoder
2080 ●26 ●42 ●44

updated 2015-02-28 03:22:43 +0200

One of the reasons I moved from Android to MeeGo and then to Sailfish was its superior multitasking ability. For me, proper multitasking works like this: I launch an app, then I optionally minimize it to temporary use another app, knowing that the first program will never, ever close on its own. This was the way Symbian worked on my favourite Nokia N95 back in 2006: I could launch as many programs as I like, and they all would work until I explicitly closed them. Running low on RAM? Not a problem: Symbian just presented the user with a message which said, "Out of memory, close unneeded programs". Most users (especially Jolla users) are not that ignorant to not know what RAM is.

After N95 I switched to Android in circa 2011, and its 'autoclosing-on-OOM' feature was the single most infuriating thing I ever experienced in Android. I do not want the operating system decide for me when to close my app. I was sick from my Firefox with 50 opened tabs constantly closing when someone calls me and the foreground application gets automatically minimized, so that I would need to re-download them all again through cellular network.

And then I switched to N9, and it was like a breath of fresh air. I've got proper multitasking again: launch app, and it works until you close it. When I switched from N9 to Jolla a year later, I was relieved that this behavior remained the same as in Harmattan.

Until I updated to Vaarainjarvi. (Maybe it was done not in Vaarainjarvi but in one of the preceding 'optional' updates, I didn't install them so I don't know). Now I have the very same nonsense I had with Android: launch "too many" apps, and Sailfish just silently closes some of them which are in the background. The release notes for Vaarainjarvi say a lot about "memory handling improvements", but the thing is, I could run 10-12 apps in parallel perfectly fine on Tahkalampi and now I can't.

I don't know why you've done this. I just want to say that if you wanted to make Sailfish more "user frendly" this way, then you're on a slippery road.

Just in case you are interested in my attitude, here it is:

I do NOT worry about Sailfish popping "low memory" warnings and

I do NOT worry about Sailfish getting sluggish when it starts to use swap because of lots of started apps.

Of course I know that not all people are like me, so I'm not asking to revert Sailfish to previous behavior. But maybe you could add a setting buried somewhere deep in the options which would allow me to just cut out this 'autoclosing' functionality? That would make my day.