I go back and forth on this.

On the one hand, you're right in that you need both a line feed and a carriage return to actually "start a new line" (+1 to Windows). On the other, it seems wasteful to have two characters do a job that, in text files, could be just as easily done by one; editing and storing text is not the same as printing it, especially when the print incantation is a vestige of mostly-obsolete hardware (+1 to Unix).

Maybe according to the defined behavior of those characters, but that can't be why notepad doesn't support Unix line endings, as it still doesn't actually line feed when it sees a line feed character. I have never tried but I also suspect it won't do a carriage return for just a carriage return character (to be fair, that wouldn't really makes sense in a text editor anyway).