Can speak for OS X, but I dual booted Win 7 with swap disabled on my first machine with a SSD. Windows would just kill the Chrome tab that was eating all my Ram

Can speak for OS X, but I dual booted Win 7 with swap disabled on my first machine with a SSD. Windows would just kill the Chrome tab that was eating all my Ram and I'd move right along. Linux locks up and is totally unresponsive even if you manually trigger the OOM killer. Windows behavior is much, much better for desktop users.