this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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Linux
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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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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