On Windows I could consistently open a 32GB matrix in Matlab with 16GB of RAM on my laptop and perform operations on the matrix. The disk would spin, and it would take 20 minutes to do a simple operation because of the swapping, but I could open it, perform the operation, save, and exit successfully. I could easily background Matlab and do email or other common tasks such as browsing with very little impact to those applications. On Linux Mint that same task locks the mouse and brings the system to its knees, I can't even kill Matlab and would typically resort to a hard reboot. I learned quickly that I can't do the same things on Linux Mint that I used to do pretty easily on Windows.
For me, Windows (7, 64 bit) behaves exactly as you report for Linux. I would love to be able to get Windows to behave like it does for you. What version were you using? Did you tweak any settings?
I haven't been running windows for a year or two now, so this was a while back, but I think I was on Windows 10, possibly it was 8 back then, no tweaks. But I was quite successful at this in Matlab specifically. If you overload memory across many processes perhaps you can get into a bad place, but when it was just one process that was abusing swap, Windows is quite good about making sure other processes aren't dramatically affected in my experience (there was some lag, but it was usable).
