In my experience swap to zram works really well. I have 16GB of RAM in my linux laptop running Ubuntu and it isn't quite enough: Chrome, Virtual box, gopls and

In my experience swap to zram works really well. I have 16GB of RAM in my linux laptop running Ubuntu and it isn't quite enough: Chrome, Virtual box, gopls and thunderbird regularly push it over the edge into swap death needing a reset to recover. My first install was the earloom killer a user space oom killer. This has a nice desktop notification and when things got tight I'd get notifications about it killing chrome processes. That made things liveable with but not perfect. I couldn't run Zoom without earlyoom killing it. I finally added swap to zram and that has helped enormously meaning I have enough ram to run everything I need without the earlyoom kicking in regularly. Anyway I'm just about to upgrade to a new laptop I can put more than 16GB of ram in, but I think I'll leave both the earlyoom and the compressed swap in place.