I don't use Windows much, nor do I care much about that environment, but from what I've seen it seems to keep RAM usage below 100% most of the time. What I do see pretty often is the drive getting stuck at 100% usage instead, which makes the whole system ridiculously unusable anyway.
Maybe not in the same way then.
Anyways, you've unlocked an old memory of mine, where Windows would crap itself due to low RAM and the fonts and interface elements would render in a "compatible" way, like using "fixedsys" font everywhere.
Docs https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/mm/multigen_lru.html#thr...
If you disable pagefile (like I did for some of my servers) and your program mallocs more than what you have in available space (even without ever dirtying a page) you will observe this.
I'm sure that this helps Windows a lot, even if it's not counted as actually used until the page is dirty.
Linux programs very often have virtual addresses many times the amount of physical ram, because there's never been any restriction. It's then very easy to just malloc huge chunks and use what you need and don't care about it too much.
Especially with many "tiny" allocations, python for example has huge sized objects which consume gobs of RAM dynamically, so any long running python process not only fragments memory but ends up having a bunch of objects consuming virtual memory...
idk why I felt the need to rant about this, but it's a difference that I've noted.
I prefer the Windows approach, it's more predictable and has better behavior under memory pressure. But it can cause issues with software written under the assumption that the OS uses memory overcommit
all these electron apps and invisible virtual machines (looking at you Claude) really don't help.
The communication is more direct too with GPT5.6 family of LLM. No more belt and suspenders.