I’d probably do a clean install (eventually) even if it looked like stuff works for now.

I know the pain, though. did rm -rf in the wrong directory and wiped half my drive in seconds. Good times.

I would consider creating a swapfile if you have an SSD. There should be countless tutorials for doing it on Ubuntu.

It might mean your windows or Ubuntu install gets sluggish, but even 32GB (less than 10% of a typical storage drive!) of spare swap space can let your active and memory-hogging processes breathe instead of invoking the SystemD-OOM killer. Also, it’s essentially free! You’ll benefit from more RAM though.

For what it’s worth, I think Ubuntu is also fairly aggressive with memory management. I remember complaints that it was a little too hasty to kill user processes under memory-limited scenarios. not sure if that was addressed

Box64 helps a lot with ARM compatibility, but yes less compatible than a comparable 3.2k gaming PC on x86