I removed the side panels and made Worksheet mode the global default. It still happens. There are certain events that trigger it. For instance, defining a single function. Start Maple, type "f:= x-> sin(x)", wait a few seconds and poof, crash. After the crash, my 2GB Swap space is full. Only some 8Gb out of the available 32Gb RAM are used by other applications.
If this problem persists, I am going to ask for a refund. This is expensive software and it quite strange how it does not work on one of the most popular operating systems among researchers.
Maple, the OS and the laptop were all "out-of-the box", no exotic tweaks or unusual configurations. Can somebody at Maplesoft escalate this please?

Last few lines of dmesg output below. Indeed Maple managed to gobble up over 23Gb of RAM doing what?

[70946.285030] oom-kill:constraint=CONSTRAINT_NONE,nodemask=(null),cpuset=/,mems_allowed=0,global_oom,task_memcg=/user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service,task=mserver,pid=39570,uid=1000
[70946.285051] Out of memory: Killed process 39570 (mserver) total-vm:23433384kB, anon-rss:22970472kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:0kB, UID:1000 pgtables:45456kB oom_score_adj:0

@Thomas Richard Actually, I always work in "worksheet mode". I did hide the right hand side and left hand side menus/panels and have not experienced a crash in the past day or two. Could that contribute? Is it a Java issue?

@acer No reason not to update. Is there any indication that the problem may be fixed in 1.2?

I just worked with Maple for over an hour before it crashed, it is somewhat unpredictable. However, once it crashes, it starts crashing minutes after each restart. I will try closing the panels and see..

It feels like some runaway process that Maple runs automatically. Suddenly, it says "evaluating" at the bottom, even if I did not enter a command, and a few seconds later it crashes.

@acer Under Help/About Maple it says "Maple 2021.1".