No, because there is no reason an OS couldn't have an integrated garbage collector. The garbage collector would have to be written in a non-garbage collected la

No, because there is no reason an OS couldn't have an integrated garbage collector. The garbage collector would have to be written in a non-garbage collected language or using a subset of the language that doesn't allocate on the GC heap, the no-runtime sample here shows that it would be possible to do one in C#. But there is no reason the rest of the OS couldn't use automatic memory management. Linux is a heavy user of refcounted data already, and there is no fundamental difference between that and other garbage collection strategies.