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submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

I just got a new laptop and installed Linux on it. I mainly run OpenSUSE.

Getting full encryption on both was a bit of a challenge and I had no idea what I'm doing. Will having the swap partition in the middle break things? Did I really need so many partitions (Mint and OpenSUSE don't show up in eachother's boot menu)?

I'm probably not gonna change this layout (because reinstallation seems like a pain) unless the swap partition's position is a problem. I'm just curious how many mistakes I made.

EDIT: I'm not upgrading my drive capacity. I do not need it.

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[-] patatahooligan@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago

The common misconception that swap is pointless stems from misunderstanding what it's supposed to do. You shouldn't be triggering the OOM killer frequently anyway. In the much more normal case where you're only using some of your RAM for running applications, the rest is used as a filesystem cache/buffer. Having swap space available gives your OP the option to evict stale application memory from RAM rather than the filesystem cache when that would be the optimal choice to make.

This page explains it detail: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html

this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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