The thing that kills linux is being out of RAM (but, to my recollection, not at all Windows - worst-case there'd be a pop-up asking for which process to close (still a GUI! and giving a choice!!)). I lived for a long time with a linux mint system where full RAM meant that even a ctrl+alt+f2 login might take minutes to process, or even just time out. Maybe things are somewhat better now (I also have earlyoom installed) but out-of-memory still is an extremely significant annoyance at its absolute best.
edit: disabled earlyoom & started a process that continuously allocates memory, still happens; ctrl+alt+f2 doesn't respond ever (DE ofc is frozen), and a htop over ssh gives a repaint every couple minutes if I'm lucky, but is useless; just rebooted via the physical reboot button after 30 minutes. Utterly unreasonable behavior.