That's cool, but in my experience if you get to the OOM killer then 80% of the time it's too late and your system is basically dead. My laptop hard reboots most of the time when this happens.
99% of the time, it's my browser, so I ended up writing a script that watches memory used. If it reaches 95%, it throws a warning, and 98% force kills my browser.
I'd rather that happen than my entire system lock up and have to hard reboot.
There's a "proper" version of this hack called early oom. I haven't used it though and now that I look at it it seems like it uses the same completely broken "guess which process to kill, who cares if it's init" system that the normal oom killer uses so your solution sounds better.
Is it so hard to just pause the system and ask the user which app to kill?
I have 32 GB but it's not enough. Try opening 8 instances of VSCode, Firefox and Chrome with a few dozen tabs. Unfortunately my laptop doesn't support 64 GB of RAM.
I know your pain. My work laptop only has 32 GB. Sometimes I have to run at least 4 to 5 instances across vs code, visual studio, and such. I wish I could use my home computer instead because that has 128 GB of RAM.
Not necessarily. When Ubuntu 22.04 had an issue where systemd-oomd was killing apps that touched the swap, something like this notification would have cleared up a lot of confusion from end users, myself included.