I've worked on memory constrained Windows VMs. The problem shows up as the application you're on dying, because guess what, you're trying to allocate memory that isn't there.
The rest of the system is still usable.
It's fine.
For the longest time I also ran with no swap on Windows (and just an excessive amount of memory). I'd notice when I'd run out of memory when a particularly hungry application like Affinity Photo died and I had a zillion browser tabs open, but again, the system is perfectly responsive and fine.
The Windows behavior seems much closer to deterministic and much more sane than the OOM killer of Linux.
I've had important background processes die on windows when the offender didn't die and the OOM situation persisted for some time - I assume because it was using fallible allocations while the other processes weren't.
The rest of the system is still usable.
It's fine.
For the longest time I also ran with no swap on Windows (and just an excessive amount of memory). I'd notice when I'd run out of memory when a particularly hungry application like Affinity Photo died and I had a zillion browser tabs open, but again, the system is perfectly responsive and fine.
The Windows behavior seems much closer to deterministic and much more sane than the OOM killer of Linux.