The existence of OOM is one of the few really stupid things in Linux

Somebody else will have to suggest a possible answer to the stack space problem :-(. It might not be possible to turn off overcommit entirely for desktop systems. But anything that can be done to make overcommit happen less often - or, equally, to make strict allocation usable for a normal workload - narrows the gap between what the kernel promises and what it can deliver, and makes the OOM killer less likely to run.

(Doesn't a process have some way to specify the max. stack size that it will use for each thread?)