Comment by epistasis
20 hours ago
It's not just Ubuntu, Arch is just as bad. The primary problem is systemd, which provided an adequate OOMd for daemons, but then all the distributions seem to be using it for interactively launched processes
If anybody can help me out with a better solution with a modern distribution, that's about 75% of the reason I'm posting. But it's been a major pain and all the GitHub issues I have encountered on it show a big resistance to having better behavior like is the default for MacOS, Windows, or older Linux.
It's funny how you say the way it used to be was better when people always complained about the OOM killer waiting until the system had entirely ground to a halt before acting, to the point some preferred to run with 0 swap so the system would just immediately go down instead.
Regardless, I believe EarlyOOM is pretty configurable, if you care to check it out.
Interesting, either I haven't run into it much or I haven't recognized the source of it when it's something I have encountered.