tl;dr: Having swap is a reasonably important part of a well functioning system. Without it, sane memory management becomes harder to achieve.

To be clear, I don’t blame the poster of this comment at all for the content of their post – this is accepted as “common knowledge” by a lot of Linux sysadmins and is probably one of the most likely things that you will hear from one if you ask them to talk about swap. It is unfortunately also, however, a misunderstanding of the purpose and use of swap, especially on modern systems.

  • lurch (he/him)@sh.itjust.works
    144·
    3 months ago

    I’m running Linux without swap for 20 years on my workstations and gaming PCs now. If you don’t hybernate and have enough RAM swap is useless.

    My memory doesn’t need to be managed. I have 20GB in my current setup and it was never full. If anything gets swapped in this situation it means it needlessly slows me down.

    I even mount tmpfs ramdisks for my shader cache dirs, because they get recreated every time anyways and why would i want anything temporary on disk, if i have 20 GB of RAM.