@dragonmouth,

Thank you for sharing your perspective on the topic of swap partitions/files in the context of modern PCs with ample RAM. You’re right that with the increasing amounts of RAM in today’s computers, the traditional role of swap as an “overflow” for RAM is less critical than it once was.

Granted that the gain in available space will be minimal but deleting swap will leave one less partition to be possibly corrupted.

One caveat with deleting swap is that some distros may refuse to install unless some kind of swap is present.

I welcome someone to offer a robust explanation. It is important for road warriors and any who rely on laptop portability.

During “sleep” [suspend to ram] current runtime details get written to swap before putting things on hold.

During “hibernate” [suspend to disk] the majority of the system state gets written to swap before power off.

If you notice, S.Daniels wrote “outdated“, he did not write “does not work“.

I agree with S. Daniels on the use of GParted. It not only provides a visual representation of your disks but also can delete your swap partition and recover that space by moving and/or resizing other partitions. Using the command line to accomplish your tasks may be ‘leet’ and cool but it is also dangerous to the health of your system. Using GParted prevents misspelling or use of incorrect CLI commands, as well as the use of incorrect options which can result in making the drive unusable.