Yes, I have also read / heard that Windows is actually very well engineered at the low level (despite the claims), and even surpasses Linux in some aspects. For example, Windows handles low RAM situations much better than Linux. During swapping Linux can become so unresponsive that even the OOM killer can fail and the only solution is hard reboot :(. But all I see people claim about Linux's superior memory management, which I think is believed largely because of the memory overcommitment. It can reduce the average RAM consumption because Linux, by default, maps the allocated pages to a read-only zero filled shared page, and allocates actual memory only when page faults occur during page writes. But this can make the worst case scenario much worse when no physical RAM or swap space is available.