If you are at the physiacl keyboard you can run the oom killer via the sysrq key. I would say that the kernel oom killer is quite usable since the last few year

If you are at the physiacl keyboard you can run the oom killer via the sysrq key. I would say that the kernel oom killer is quite usable since the last few years but is triggered too late - especially for applications like Firefox that handle malloc failures gracefully.