To make it simple your system didn’t crash, it just hanged the desktop user interface, that’s because Linux is built normally for a server environment (that don’t run desktop environments…), and your distro whatever that choice is forgot to install a Linux out-of-memory (OOM) killer, like for example EarlyOOM https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom, some distributions a lot actually, also seems to forget or wrongly presume the user has the wisdom and knowledge to install correctly libraries and daemons for things like zram and zswap, etc.

This is actually a half-truth. Yes wasted ram is bad, but, at the same time, wasted ram can be good if the programs running on the computer are not designed to cope with a dynamic amount of cache memory. Perfect example is the Chrome browser. People falsely claim that all the ram Chrome is using up is good because it would otherwise go to waste. This is a half-truth about the Chrome browser. In reality, Chrome uses up the same amount of ram regardless of whether your system has terabytes of free RAM or just a few megabytes. Chrome fails to dynamically adapt to the memory constrains of the system, so it would be ideal for Chrome to use less memory so that it’s less of nuisance when your system is low on free memory so that your system has to use less swap-space.

Source: I write lots of Linux software, and I know this stuff well.

Uhuh. That will have to be a technical article on its own 🙂

On my Linux laptop I have 8GB RAM on SSD so I rarely use it all but when it’s over, computer chokes strongly and becomes hardly usable… although there is SWAP.

On my old Linux laptop with 4GB of RAM on HDD all works smoothly till RAM ends and computer freezes and that happens eventually after about 1 hour usage.

Somehow Windows manage better RAM by smoothly managing virtual memory while Linux slows down considerably (or freezes on HDD) when its trying to put things in SWAP memory.

So although Linux is lighter on RAM in general Windows handles much better when RAM is over. This is unfortunate because I prefer Linux but it is what it is. In result Windows can run slower but stead on low RAM computers while Linux will get uneven performance and even freezes when RAM will end. At least that’s my experience.

In a nutshell, Windows’s virtual memory is far superior then Linux’s Swap :(. I can only how it will be improved but so far no one talks about it as if it was OK but it isn’t. Swap sucks big time!

and just in choosing a lighter window manager (or desktop environment) like AwesomeWM (an excellent productivity booster actually), Fluxbox, WIndowMaker, JWM, etc., you can save hundreds of mb of occupied ram