Ubuntu 26.10 Plans to Keep the Desktop Alive During OOM Events

Ubuntu’s development team is planning changes for Ubuntu 26.10 to make the desktop more resilient when available memory is exhausted. Under the proposed approach, essential desktop processes will receive lower out-of-memory (OOM) scores, making them less likely to be terminated by the kernel’s OOM killer. Standard applications and background tasks will retain higher default scores, so they should be prioritised for termination when memory runs out.

The article says this is intended to reduce cases where memory exhaustion kills active foreground applications and triggers the desktop’s “Oops” crash screen.

The changes also disable systemd-oomd’s automatic termination of entire user sessions by default, according to the report. The adjustment is intended to prevent the desktop environment from being killed along with other processes during severe memory pressure. The Ubuntu development team’s discussion of the work is linked in the article, but no evidence is provided that rising RAM prices directly motivated the decision; the report presents that as speculation rather than a stated reason.

Ubuntu 26.10 is expected to be released on 15 October, although the article does not provide further detail about testing, configuration options or whether the changes could affect specific applications.