On Linux, the OOM reaper should come for the memory cannibal eventually, but it can take quite a while. Certainly it’s unlikely to be quick enough to avoid the desktop going unresponsive for a while. And it may take out a couple of other processes first, since it takes out the process holding the most memory rather than the one that’s trying to allocate, if I recall correctly.
On Linux, the OOM reaper should come for the memory cannibal eventually, but it can take quite a while. Certainly it’s unlikely to be quick enough to avoid the desktop going unresponsive for a while. And it may take out a couple of other processes first, since it takes out the process holding the most memory rather than the one that’s trying to allocate, if I recall correctly.