OTOH the mere existence of committed memory makes it hellish as a user when *something* leaks committed memory. You start getting out of memory errors while half of your RAM is empty, just because some half-assed driver somewhere leaks. To add insult to injury, task manager / resource monitor is always unable to show the exact process/driver that leaks; I had to randomly kill things to find the culprit.

I'll take the linux behavior any time when dealing with poorly written software (which is most software).