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Just tried a little experiment.
A clean install of LL 3.4x64
This was a manual install with 50g allocated to / and 250g allocated to /home......no Swap
System fully installed and updated.
I run you tube and when checking htop it was using less than 1g of ram.
System ram is 4g.
Do we really need swap.....?.
Jocklad
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I think that's a great question. I tried the same experiment as you did with a computer with 8gb of memory in it. Since I don't spend my days editing 1080p blu-ray video I found I didn't have a problem at all. I am sure your forum post will get a lot of yes you do, no you don't, but times have changed. It seems to me that an intel i5 processor with 8gb of memory (or more) just doesn't need one. As an example I installed Xubuntu 17.04 yesterday to try the new release. I've used 16.04 before. As of this release Ubuntu & Xubuntu do not have a swap partition. The OS installs a swap file. Makes much, much more sense as you can increase, or decrease the file according to your personal needs. Swap made sense in the era of pentium computers, but today?
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My understanding is swap (whether a swap partition or a swap file) is sometimes required by some applications. I think Hibernate and/or Suspend are examples of apps that may require some swap. If you're concerned about wasting the space, I have to say 50 GB is a very large root partition, especially since you're already creating a separate /home partition. If you're running 4 GB of ram, and that is the maximum you can install on that computer, I don't see the harm in a 4 GB swap file or partition.
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