There's two things that cause this. First, Windows has a variable swap file size, whereas Linux has a fixed size, so Windows can just fill up your drive, instead of running out of swap space. Second, the default behavior for the out-of-memory killer in Linux isn't very aggressive, with the default behavior being to over-commit memory instead of killing processes.

As far as I know, Linux still doesn't support a variable-sized swap file, but it is possible to change how aggressively it over-commits memory or kills processes to free memory.

As to why there differences are there, they're more historical than technical. My best guess is that Windows figured it out sooner, because it has always existed in an environment where multiple programs are memory hogs, whereas it wasn't common in Linux until the proliferation of web-based everything requiring hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes of memory for each process running in a Chrome tab or Electron instance, even if it's something as simple as a news article or chat client.

Check out this series of blog posts. for more information on Linux memory management: https://dev.to/fritshooglandyugabyte/series/16577

I've had that same experience. On new systems I install earlyoom. I'd rather have one app die than the whole system.

You'd think after 30 years of GUIs and multi-tasking, we'd have this figured out, but then again we don't even have a good GUI framework.

The annoying thing I've found with Linux under memory stress (and still haven't found a nice way to solve) is I want it to always always always kill firefox first. Instead it tends to either kill nothing (causing the system to hang) or kill some vital service.

> Windows remains mostly fully responsive even when memory is being pushed to the limits and swapping gigabytes per second

In my experience this is only on later versions of the NT Kernel and only on NVME (mostly the latter I think).

Like Linux / open source often, it depends on what you do with it!

The kernel is very slow to kill stuff. Very very very very slow. It will try and try and try to prevent having to kill anything. It will be absolutely certain it can reclaim nothing more, and it will be at an absolute crawl trying to make every little kilobyte it can free, swapping like mad to try options to free stuff.

But there are a number of daemons you can use if you want to be more proactive! Systemd now has systemd-oomd. It's pretty good! There's others, with other strategies for what to kill first, based on other indicators!

The flexibility is a feature, not a bug. What distro are you on? I'm kind of surprised it didn't ship with something on?