You probably didn't even realise it was a memory error. A lot of the instability of Windows can be attributed to the use of non-ECC memory in typical home PCs. Linux tends to run on servers with ECC memory, so at least some of the perspective of it being "more stable" comes from this anecdotal evidence.
The parent comment saying that they never see ECC errors in the wild is missing a few things:
- Server memory tends to be clocked lower than consumer memory, so errors are less frequent to begin with.
- The errors are not evenly distributed. Some memory sticks have a high error rate, others are virtually zero. There's batch-to-batch variations.
- I've done my own tests on hundreds of servers. We run burn-in tests for about 24-48 hours. About 95% have zero errors of any kind, but 5% have a high enough rate that putting them into production would be a mistake. ECC allows us to catch those bit errors instead of silently accepting them and allowing data corruption to creep in.
- I've personally had 3 different personal computers experience high memory error rates, to the point of multiple BSODs per day and data corruption. They all started off "good" and slowly turned "bad". The only reason I knew to look for memory corruption as the root cause is because of my extensive industry experience. A grandma using the same PC would have just blamed Windows for being unstable.
- Vendors like Microsoft simply ignore all crash error reports sent back by telemetry with only 1 or 2 samples, because those are virtually guaranteed to be caused by memory corruption, not programmer error. I've done similar memory dump collection and found that easily 30% of all crashes were unique in this way, suggesting that ECC memory could improve PC stability significantly.
- Suggesting that ECC memory is not needed because "good" memory doesn't need it and only "bad" memory is a problem is missing the point. All memory is bad, it's just that the bit error rates are different!