Read/write operations can happen in the background at any moment as long as the drive is mounted, so that’s not terribly comforting.

Anyway, Linux has a mount option, sync, to do the same thing that Windows does with removable media. Dunno if any desktop environments actually use it, but they could.

Besides being slower, though, it has the downside of causing more write operations (since they can’t be batched together into fewer, larger writes), so flash drives will wear out faster. I imagine Windows’ default behavior has the same problem, although with Windows users accustomed to pulling out their drives without unmounting, I suppose that’s the lesser of two evils.