Its running in ram so no, it would destroy everything.

What's worse is if you have any storage mounted. I've known people who wiped there backups

The reason you expect this is because Windows has a file lock behaviour that won’t let you delete a file when it’s in use, in Linux this limitation doesn’t exist.

Raymond Chan, arguably one of the best software engineers in the world, and a Microsoft employee, has repeatedly lamented the near malware like work arounds developers have had to invent to overcome this limitation with uninstallers.

Think about uninstalling a game. You need to run “uninstall.exe” but you don’t want uninstall.exe to exist after you’ve run it… but you can’t delete a file that’s in use. Uninstall.exe will always be in use when you run it….so how do you make it remove itself?

Schedule a task? Side load a process? Inject a process? Many ways…. But most look like malware.

Linux has never suffered this flaw.

Before throwing away an old laptop, I had it do that to itself. Well, more specifically I used shred, which doesn't just mark files as 'deleted', but also actively overwrites the bytes on disk.

I started it from a TTY, so that there was no GUI that could want to load files from disk and then potentially crash the whole operation. But yeah, it just went through like normal and I ended up back on my shell (which makes sense, the shell should be in RAM).
It was only when I ran exit to close that shell, that the system showed it was irreparably broken.

I did then also take out the hard drive to whack it with a hammer, just to be sure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A lot of Linux distros load most system required processes into memory, which is why you can update while using the system. This would also allow you to (probably) delete everything.

Well, maybe. My explanation was an oversimplification.

You can always try it and see for yourself (in a VM of course).

It would delete all files, but if you happen to be running a distro configured to run from a RAM disk after boot then it won't actually immediately halt (see almost every single liveCD Linux environment)