this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
13 points (93.3% liked)

Linux for Leftists

138 readers
1 users here now

A Community for all leftists wanting to join and being part of a community that talks about Linux, Unix and the Free Software Community

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Hello Comrades,

Thanks for all your advice about setting up Linux. It was a success. The problem is that I'm now I'm intrigued and I'd like to play around a bit more.

I'm thinking of building a cheap-ish computer but I have a few questions. I'll split them into separate posts to make things easier. Note: I won't be installing anything that I can't get to work on Linux.

Question about storage and swap memory.

I plan to install an SSD of maybe 128–256GB for the system files and a larger HDD for storage. I would partition the SSD so that I could install a few different distros without losing any installation. This way I can commit to some longer experiments before deciding which distro to use.

The question is: should I have the swap partition on the SSD (with the OS partition) or (separately) on the HDD?

And if I install multiple distros, do I need a different swap partition for each one? For example, if I install 16GB RAM, do I need a 16GB partition for, say, Mint, Debian, and Ubuntu? Or can I let them 'share' the swap partition?

Are there any additional security/privacy risks of installing more than one distro on the same SSD card?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've seen and read that before, and while I don't have any hard data, anecdotally, my machine with 64GB ram does not have a swap file or partition and runs just fine. I have had similar results on a 32GB laptop.

The link doesn't really go into any specific real world use cases where swap is critical, and mostly discusses the memory contention issues. Still, worth a read for anything thinking about turning swap on or off.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think the point is that swap is critical. Whether that is true will depend on your workload and hardware. But the point is it makes memory management better and more efficient. Whether you notice a difference in performance or not is again dependent on your workload & hardware. I personally see no reason to not dedicate a couple gigs to swap even with lots of memory on a personal system.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, that's fair. I have always had fairly limited storage, due to dual booting, so wasting space on swap always felt pointless. I guess it's a bit arbitrary :D

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago