This makes sense for servers, because they shouldn't really have any significant amount of virtual memory space tied up by non-resident allocations. On a deskt

This makes sense for servers, because they shouldn't really have any significant amount of virtual memory space tied up by non-resident allocations. On a desktop OS, the user has a much larger breadth of software loaded and is only using a subset of a handful of software's allocated memory at once. As long as all of that can be in RAM at once, everything else can be safely swapped out without serious performance degradation. The OS can even prefer to swap out long-dormant processes (like, say, the rarely used SSH server on your desktop) to use that RAM for disk cache.