Honestly I loved it a lot more pre-2022, when Ubuntu added a super aggressive OOM killer that only operates on the level of an entire systemd run unit. Meaning that if you are running computation in, say, a shell and one for your subprocesses running computation takes too much memory, it takes out the entire shell and terminal window, leaving no trace of what happened, including all the terminal logs.

And if you are running Chrome, and something starts taking a lot of memory, say goodbye to the entire app without any niceties.

(Yes, this is a mere pet peeve but it has been causing me so much pain over the past year, and it's such an inferior way to deal with memory limits tha what came before it, I don't know why anybody would have taken OOM logic from systemd services and applied it to use launched processes.)

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rick_dalton 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is really annoying me as well. I use a program for work that can occasionally use a lot of ram, while saving or interpolating for example. On my little MacBook Air with just 8GB of ram everything works fine, it just swaps a whole lot more for a short period. On my desktop with 16GB ram and Ubuntu oom just kills it, my workaround is the swapspace package which adds swap files under high load, works so far.

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saghm 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have to wonder if Ubuntu's prescriptive stance on things like this is becoming increasingly outdated in an age where there's actually a decent experience out of the box for a lot more stuff on Linux. I've long since moved on from using it personally for my devices, but I'm fairly certain my tolerance for spending effort tinkering to get things working like I want is a lot higher than even most Linux users, so it's hard for me to gauge if the window have moved significantly in that regard for the average Linux user.

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timbit42 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I find it interesting how many people have Ubuntu in mind when it comes to a Linux desktop when it hasn't been a great experience ever since they switched to Gnome. They don't really care about the desktop anymore. They are now a corporation that is enshitifying their product with things like SNAPs.

If you want a distro that really cares about the desktop experience today, try Linux Mint. Windows users seem to adapt to it quite quickly and easily. It's familiar and has really good defaults that match what people expect.

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epistasis 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	saghm 22 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	tmtvl an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

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mort96 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It sounds like your primary issue is that you have a severe RAM deficiency for what you're trying to use your machine for. Any OOM killer, be it the kernel's per-process one or systemd-oomd's per-service one, only exists to try to recover from an out-of-memory scenario where the alternative is to kernel panic (in the case of the kernel's oom killer) or for the system to completely lock up (in the case of systemd-oomd).

Try doing less at once, or getting more memory.

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digiown 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> getting more memory

A bit hard to do now :(

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epistasis 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My primary issue is that a system that did an OK job at dealing with low memory situations has been replaced with a completely inadequate system.

If your solution is "don't ever run out of memory" my solution is "I won't ever use your OS unless forced to."

Every other OS handles this better, and my work literally requires pushing the bounds of memory on the box, whether it's 64GB or 1TB of RAM. Killing an entire cgroup is never an acceptable solution, except for the long-running servers that systemd is meant to run.

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mort96 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The kernel OOM killer has never done an adequate job for me. It tends to hesitate to kill anything until the system has literally been completely 100% unresponsive for over half an hour. That's completely unacceptable. Killing a cgroup before the system becomes unresponsive is a million times more desirable default behaviour for a normal desktop system (which Ubuntu Desktop is).

Of course, if it's absolutely not compatible with your work, you can just disable systemd-oomd. I'm wondering though, what sort of work are you doing where you can't tune stuff to use 95% of your 1TB of memory instead of 105% of it?

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orbital-decay 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As far as I know, Windows just grinds to a halt entirely, system processes start crashing, or you get a BSOD, and mobile OSes kill the app without any trace. I never had an OOM situation on Macs so I don't know about macOS.

Windows is unstable even if you have more than enough memory but your swap is disabled, due to how its virtual memory works. It generally behaves much worse than others under heavy load and when various system resources are nearly exhausted.

There are several advanced and very flexible OOM killers available for Linux, you can use them if it really bothers you (honestly you're the first I've seen complaining about it). Some gaming/realtime distros are using them by default.

	▲	p_ing 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Even NT4 handled OOM scenarios better than modern Linux. No, it didn't grind to a halt, it would grind the rust off of the spinning platters. But it would continue to run your applications until the application was finished or you intervened.

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mixmastamyk 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How does Mint work? I recommended it regardless for removing snap.