Actually no, it's just that the programs on Linux usually accept SIGINT, SIGTERM, etc pretty gracefully. Some are even smart enough to handle it on a thread hang. SIGKILL is last resort.

Lots of Windows applications like to ignore the close request because Windows doesn't have signals and instead you can only pass a window name to request exit which is the same as clicking the close button.

So any hung software won't respond and you have to terminate it.

both OS ask a process to end nicely? Then force closing in windows is with task manager or kill -9 in linux

And as always with this meme: Both Windows and Linux can ask a process nicely to terminate or kill it outright. And the default for both is to ask nicely.

This is entirely wrong

Sigterm: "End this process or next time I bring my -9"

Unless it is nfs unmount on down server. Or failed disk...

you forgot that you have to spend about 2 minutes with windows "searching for a solution" (who knows what that does??) and then another minute reporting it to microsoft

Typing “kill -9” into a terminal is the equivalent to breaking out the acetylene torch when a nut won’t budge

Is there some Linux equivalent to "ctrl + alt + del?" I get that killing a process from the terminal is preferred, but one of the few things I like about windows is if the GUI freezes up, I can pretty much always kill the process by pressing ctrl+alt+del and finding it in task manager. Using Linux if I don't already have the terminal open there are plenty of times I'm just force restarting the computer because I don't know what else to do.

How the OOM Killer asks a process to terminate:

indiscriminate spraying

mainly wrong, by default kill send a SIGTERM, you can try SIGINT or SIGQUIT too, and in the end SIGKILL of course. Same in windows there is different way

xkill is one of my favorite commands

https://youtu.be/Fow7iUaKrq4

TerminateProcess() is pretty reliable, but it doesn't form part of the C signals stack on Windows like kill -9. So for instance, if you're doing process control on Python, you need to use a special Windows-only API to access TerminateProcess().

I feel like I've had the opposite experience in the gui (maybe a KDE issue?) closing gui windows frequently lock up, and I find I frequently have to drop to the command line in order to properly kill some programs

I've honestly not had this problem on windows since Windows 8.