alt Hacker NewsHonestly 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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I have to wonder if Ubuntu's prescriptive stance on things like this is becoming increasingly outdated in an age where there's actually a decent experience out of the box for a lot more stuff on Linux.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.
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.
How does Mint work? I recommended it regardless for removing snap.
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.