[rashkov]

Do you have a swap partition? If you don't have a swap partition enabled, then your computer will freeze when your RAM fills up.

I have the XPS 16" and this happens to me under Arch Linux, but thankfully not very often because I have 16GB of RAM. If you really have to break out of the freeze, then you can try switching to another terminal window (eg. ctrl-alt-F3 or some other function key), then try to kill the offending process. It might take a minute for your keyboard inputs to take effect, but it generally can be done.

[bscphil]

Tip: I have the exact same setup, and I use earlyoom (https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom) to prevent this. Previously, I was frequently unable to break out of the freeze no matter how long I waited, forcing a hard reboot, but with earlyoom just a single memory-heavy app gets killed instead.