I'm pretty sure what you're calling RAM compression is swapping to zram, in which case the answer is that Some people prefer to not swap at all because that will still make things janky in comparison to just killing things when you're out of memory. (I would endorse earlyoom for that)
I’ve heard this position multiple times, and yet every single benchmark I’ve seen repeated by teams of engineers in multiple contexts fails to replicate this fear. Zswap really is something that should just always be enabled.
For me it solved most of these lockups when using heavy ram apps (Electron, Firefox + Teams, etc) and keeps the system responsive. I am happy with it and plan to keep it enabled. I have no data to validate except that I don't remember having to SysRq key + F some app for a long time.
For example, at Oculus they ran both performance benchmarks in a lab and collected feedback data from field telemetry. Now of course, it’s always possible some performance counter was overlooked / the degradation requires a specific workload to show, but the lack of ability to show any evidence of a difference implies that you probably are unlikely to see it given that the detractors were very vocal and engineering at big corps tends to be more stasis driven.
I saw this also repeated at Apple (not Zswap since not Linux, but similar idea of compressing pages) and Android.
My point was that as a new user the default experience is unfriendly and saying that I have to understand the nuance between different ram related packages in order to talk about it is just proving my point.
I'm not saying that a new user should need to understand the nuance, I'm questioning whether your understanding of the underlying problem is accurate. I do agree that it's a poor experience for the system to freeze up under excess memory pressure, I just think the correct fix is less swap combined with earlyoom.
Gah I am so tired of explaining this in this thread: As the system begins running out of memory, it starts using more of the zram. The zram is compressed which uses CPU and slows the system down enough to notice it during which time I notice and begin closing apps. The alternative, without zram, is it's super fast right until I run out of memory then bam my whole system locks up. Zram also effectively makes the total available ram larger because zram swap is actually useable whereas swap to disk is so slow the system basically locks up when you start depending on it as if it were ram. Just try it dammit! It takes a few mins to set up and open enough stuff to see the effects.
In addition to swap on zram, there's also zswap. zswap is not quite as good as swap on zram, but almost certainly is better suited to systems that you want to have be able to hibernate.
