FreeDesktop.org solution (being deployed on several GNOME distributions today): https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/hadess/low-memory-monitor

Used in combination with compressed swap (ZRAM), it greatly alleviates this problem on the (at least GNOME-based) Linux Desktop.

Still, browser really need to do something about the memory problems they're causing. They're Windows 95-level bad at managing their high memory/leak cases - just leave a browser with more than a few dozen tabs open over night. Especially with a tab that does background fetches (e.g. Facebook or Twitter or something with a lot of timer-driven Ajax queries).

I assert that if it weren't for browsers, there'd be no memory problems on modern desktops.

https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom has worked well for me in the past.

Yeah. OOM-kill handling wants to be a silver bullet, sort of. For instance, Linux kernel provides a number of I/O schedulers or net schedulers, etc. to pick from, but OOM kill is "one size fits all". And it doesn't really look like things are going to change [1][2][3].

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/alpine.DEB.2.21.1810221406400.1...

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20181024155454.4e63191fbfaa0441...

[3] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20181023055655.GM18839@dhcp22.s...

android has something similar, the low memory killer daemon (lmkd).

both use the recently added pressure stall information (PSI)[0] infrastructure in the kernel to determine when the system is overloaded.

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/775971/