I currently have a memory or CPU issues (I have not investigated), which causes my windows install to lag out for a second, but my Linux install just completely crashes the entire system

Blue screens were much more common back in the day, I guess nowadays they're equally stable. Windows current issues are the deliberate choices Microsoft makes

I have crashed Linux before. On a Raspberry Pi. I was fucking around with some electronics on a breadboard, hooking them up to the GPIO pins while the thing is running like a dunce, and a male jumper wire connected to Vcc got away from me and dragged across the circuit board near the SoC.

It came back up after I power cycled the board. I've otherwise never actually crashed Linux. I've crashed software running on Linux, sure, but I've never seen a kernel panic in 10 years of penguin flavored computing.

For a while, Linux Mint was significantly less stable than Windows 10 on my previous laptop. Worse, sometimes the system crash would freeze *everything, where it wouldn't even let me do the CTRL ALT F1 to get a basic shell, so the only solution was a full power off/on