The trade-off depends on how your system is set up. Eg Google used to (and perhaps still does?) run their servers without swap, because they had built fault to

The trade-off depends on how your system is set up. Eg Google used to (and perhaps still does?) run their servers without swap, because they had built fault tolerance in their fleet anyway, so were happier to deal with the occasional crash than with the occasional slowdown. For your desktop at home, you'd probably rather deal with a slowdown that gives you a chance to close a few programs, then just crashing your system. After all, if you are standing physically in front of your computer, you can always just manually hit the reset button, if the slowdown is too agonising.