Windows starts doing awful things under slight memory pressure like 80% usage. There are cascading failures like high ram usage -> swap+compression -> power+th

Windows starts doing awful things under slight memory pressure like 80% usage. There are cascading failures like high ram usage -> swap+compression -> power+thermal limits -> desktop responsiveness is unreasonably bad (i.e. >5 minutes to open task manager to kill a single firefox.exe using >10G memory caused by a single misbehaving javascript among many tabs) This is an incredibly common scenario for laptops that cost less than $1000. Free memory means things will probably not go to shit in the next 10 minutes. Linux is a whole different story with different sharp edges.