For a couple of decades I have ran my desktop without swap, for the simple reason that all it does in practice is slow down the system to a crawl when a rogue process is gobbling all RAM. For my taste, a straightforward failure is better than an unresponsive system. Not that it happens very often, anyway.
I prevent to auto kill the biggest memory eaters (which is always chrome/chromium/electron) once the the system actually is well into swapping. Usually it comes back without any killing without me hardly noticing unresponsiveness and otherwise it comes back fast once the chrome has been killed. This way I don’t risk the system OOMing an actual important process (like a compile I am doing) while that will easily and without issues continue after Chrome is not there. Anything important, in my case, is never a non terminal process.
Maybe it isn't that bad if the swap file / partition is on an SSD? I actually haven't ran out of RAM since I moved to SSDs, even when I still had 16 GiB. And now there are some ultra fast NVMe drives out there.
Last time I checked, which was long ago to be fair, SSDs had a latency that was still orders of magnitude higher than RAM, so the system would still slow down to a crawl regardless.
Now, keep in mind, this doesn't account for things like dual or quad channel which bumps up the bandwidth even further though doesn't really affect latency.
The fastest and most reasonably priced consumer NVMe I could find:
NVMe Latency = 200000ns
NVMe Bandwidth = ~3GB/s
The fastest consumer (or low enterprise) grade persistent storage is terribly slower and takes longer to respond than the cheapest DDR5 ram.
Still waaaaaaaaaaaay slower than ram, but getting closer. Before giving up on optane, intel used to make memory modules with optane on them (as a form of backup I think)
My understanding is that the slowness comes from program code being removed from memory to free up space, forcing the system to constantly re-read it from disk. I still get the slowness without swap.
