I've never encountered this with "many apps" starting to OOM, but many times with one process OOMing. That one will simply crash and everything else continues to run unharmed.
IME, if a process grows out of control, Linux won't notice until the whole system is thrashing, at which point it's too late and it tries killing random things like browser tabs way before the offending process.
In rare cases Linux might recover, but only because I hammered C-c the right place 30 minutes ago. In most cases a hard reboot is required (I left it overnight once, fans spinning at max, hoping the kernel would eventually accept my plea for help, but she had other priorities).
I guess OOM is more problematic on low-memory systems or when you have more than a nominal amount of swap.
If you have enough memory that the desktop environment, browsers, and other processes that should keep running only use a small fraction of it, the OOM killer can pick a reasonable target reliably. A process that tries to allocate too much memory gets killed, and everything is robust and deterministic. I sometimes trigger OOM several times in an hour, for example when trying to find reasonable computational parameters for something.
On the contrary, it's worse on systems with lots of memory, because those are the systems that are trying to do more.
About 8 years ago I got a work machine with 384GB of RAM, and I installed early_oom on it to make the OOM killer work a whole load earlier, otherwise the system would just become completely unresponsive for hours if one of my students/colleagues accidentally ran something that would make it run out of RAM.
How much memory do you think is reasonable? I've had it happen to me with 16GB and even 32GB, where I never ever have this issue on Windows (unless for some reason I'm on a 2GB RAM system for God knows why). I wish people would stop defending pathological behavior that's broken for standard desktop use. What's wrong with wanting things to improve?
Nobody was defending anything. I just told that I don't remember having any issues with the Linux OOM killer, and guessed a potential reason.
I haven't really used any Windows version later than 2000 for anything except gaming, so I don't know how things work there these days. I mostly use macOS and Linux, and I've had far more trouble with pathological memory management behavior in macOS. Basically, macOS lets individual processes allocate and use far more memory than is physically available. When I'm running something with unpredictable memory requirements, I have to babysit the computer and kill the process manually if necessary, or the system may become slow and poorly responsive.
I'm guessing you are referring to "swapping", though?
If it's just one user process, it'll be killed by the OOM killer¹. That application will just be gone: poof. And for the rest you'll probably not notice anything, not even a hiccup in your Bluetooth headphones.
If it's many services, or services that are excempt from that killer, your system might start swapping. Which, indeed, leads to the case you describe.
