It will crash if you max out your ram and have 0 swap, in the same way your windows system will crash if you have 0 page file.

In recent years its become really trendy to just not use swap on linux and it pisses me off to no end. Its a horrible configuration all to save like 1% of your diskspace.

edit: Also, most distros out of the box do use significantly less than windows. My debian testing xfce install that I just did here a few days ago uses 700mb on a cold boot.