I love Linux.  Sure, it ain’t perfect; there’s still some things that could “feel” a bit more modern.  But at the same time, there is so much to its credit that it’s hard to ignore.

Take, for instance, virtual memory.  All modern computers have it.  Mobile phones use it.  Basically any computer-oriented device probably used virtual memory paging instead of real address allocation.  It’s just more flexible and safer to leave all the memory management to the operating system kernel.

The nice thing about the open source OS, however, is that you can determine just how “swappy” Linux is.  It’s a feature which allows incredible flexibility.

For example, a recent filesystem and partition resizing operation that I undertook had the strange side-effect of rendering my swap partition strangely ineffective.  Being able to tune the swappiness of the kernel has allowed me to fix and test the problem in-situ.