Linux kills SSDs faster, because parts of the Linux ecosystem (including systemd) generate unnecessary write‑amplification, and Linux is slower than Windows/BSD to adopt modern SSD‑preservation techniques.

Linux is fragmented, slow to standardize, and full of subsystems that thrash storage because nobody agrees on sane defaults.

Systemd isn't horrible, but it's extremely heavy on disk writing and Lennart Pottering is no longer involved with it. On a busy system, it produces continuous low‑level write thrashing, especially for laptops with flaky suspend/resume, desktops with misbehaving services, servers with noisy logs, and distros that crank journald verbosity up.

BSD, OpenRC, Runit, and s6 barely touch the disk unless something actually happens. Systemd touches it because something might happen.

Windows adopted SSD‑aware defaults early with automatic TRIM, write-coalescing, aggressive caching (why it sometimes appears to use more RAM), NTFS metadata batching, and predictable journaling.

Linux DEs generate pointless writes, like GNOME tracker indexing, KDE Baloo indexing, Flatpak metadata churn, Snap loop-mount spam, electron apps spamming logs, browser cache directories with no write-limits, and package managers re-writing entire meta-data trees.

Windows and macOS throttle background writes. -Linux does not.

Linux swap behavior is notoriously aggressive. Systemd‑oomd monitors memory pressure and writes state constantly. Cgroups v2 memory accounting causes extra metadata writes. Swappiness defaults are often too high. Zram is not enabled by default on most distros. Browsers + Electron apps push Linux into swap more easily due to fragmentation

When Linux hits swap, SSDs get hammered.