Is there a name for a process like this? Very interesting approach I want to take with future software.

Besides graceful degradation mentioned in sibling comments, it could also be considered a form of load shedding.

https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/using-load-shedding-...

Closest I can think of is Safe Mode, at least based on the definition - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_mode - but running on reduced resources isn't exactly the same, so I'm sure there's a better answer.

Inviting correction by people with more extensive engineering experience; most of mine is in breaking rather than building.

Perhaps the most appropriate term would be fault-tolerant?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_tolerance

FT usually (at least in IT) implies a way to switch/defer/transfer the task to other node without an interruption (or a very minor degradation) of service.

A synchronious replication of a VM would be an example of a FT service (so it can continue to work without losing the current state). Failover is a process of restoring the operation with losing the current state (so vmware's HA is clearly FO if you dig below the marketing bullshit).

Described behaviour of the Task Manager is not FT, FO or HA.

Other commenters provided good variants, personally I would go with "Graceful Degradation", because it proceeds with a minimal functionality only if there were problems with normal operation.

"Limp-home mode" -- as seen in many cars -- comes to mind.

Also "Graceful Degradation".

And "Progressive Enhancement" [1], although that is usually used in web development context.

Adjusting the introductory statement on that Mozilla page we could arrive at something like:

"Progressive enhancement is a design philosophy that provides a baseline of essential content and functionality to as many users as possible, while delivering the best possible experience only to users" ...whose computers have sufficient resources such as RAM and CPU cycles available to process and display it.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Progressiv...

Good engineering? An engineer worth their salt should always, in my opinion, contrast resource demand with resource supply and scale down the complexity of the workload in the face of a resource shortage.

That sounds perhaps too broad of a claim. Good engineering is to balance the needs of customers against the available time and cost of development, right? Scaling an app for low resource situations takes a lot of effort, often would result in a degraded experience and/or functionality, and plenty of apps don’t have any customer demand for such fallbacks, which is why plenty of good engineers and teams consciously choose not to spend their engineering budget this way. The Task Manager, being integrated into the OS and especially critical in low resource situations, has an incredibly strong argument here to work in low resource situations. Tons of user-space apps don’t make sense to scale at all, if memory is low or cpu is high from other apps, then it’s outside the bounds of the app to worry about. You would agree that not all engineering should be resilient to any and all conditions, and that it’s okay to design something that requires certain resources to be available from the start, wouldn’t you?

Only if this trade off is important enough to dedicate time to it. Good engineering is the balancing of trade offs, including the available amount of time.

A term lie craftsman engineering might be appropriate - someone who goes over and above the requirements because they can afford the time necessary to fulfill their personal aesthetic.

Graceful degradation

I like to call it the "oxygen mask". Keeps you conscious while you diagnose a potentially fatal problem

Degraded mode enabled maybe?

It’s similar to the circuit breaker design pattern as well.