Handling non-responsive and frozen applications

Imho desktop Linux is usually set up where a single bad app can lock up the whole system. This is not every Linux system, but I run across it more than I would like. I believe part of this is an optimistic approach to memory management which makes the system run better overall most of the time.

Windows seems slow as hell most of the time, but killing a process seems to work reliably (not clicking on the hung app takeover UI, using task kill or task manager)

I don't understand these memes about killing processes in Linux vs Windows.