I'm not so sure. When someone says "the memory management issues in OS X", I feel pretty confident in assuming specifically which problem they are referring to.

There are some memory models which appear to behave in a way which is relatively psychologically pleasing, and some which do not.

When users are using a program, there are certain times when they have a reasonable expectation that the machine is going to need some time to complete a task ("click and wait"). There are other times when they have no such expectation, and if the machine makes them wait, they get annoyed.

It isn't about the total time they have to wait, its about whether that waiting occurs when they expect it to or not.

Further, when they start to experience these unexpected, annoying pauses, they have a certain expectation that adding more RAM to the system should solve the problem, and when it doesn't, their annoyance only intensifies.

Having used both Linux and OS X as a desktop, I'm going to claim that the Linux VM behavior is pleasing in the ways described above, and the OS X behavior is not.

My understanding is that this is due to just one underlying behavior of the VM: When experiencing memory pressure, Linux (generally) favors evicting filesystem cache over swapping out stack/heap memory to disk, and OS X does not.

It's pretty hilarious that this is in one area in which Linux put the user first, while OS X has been plagued by the engineers saying "there is no problem" over and over again.