There are lots of times I have ran out of memory on modern desktops. Even with ones that are relatively large mounts of RAM, 16/32 GB. The argument for swap is

There are lots of times I have ran out of memory on modern desktops. Even with ones that are relatively large mounts of RAM, 16/32 GB. The argument for swap is even higher on desktops then Facebook servers because unlike servers you lack the predictable work flow. And you are going to run into more situations were you have memory leaks or processes that are running that you don't use for extended periods of time. Not having swap on the desktop leaves you with a unoptimized system. > B. Without swap, the culprit is immediately identified and killed. Your system is perfectly usable, aside from a killed process. No. This is never been my experience. The normal experience is: OOM killer kicks in, something strange happens, and user is left confused as to why what happened happened. It requires sysadmin skills to go in and interpret dmesg to understand what happened, and even then it is likely to be very unclear without additional information. > Note that depending on your distro, the good case B. may have become a bit harder to achieve recently: It's always been shitty. It hasn't "gotten worse". It's always been bad. OOM is a emergency situation and still leaves your system in an unknown state.