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What function does the 0.5GB swap have?

I just wish Linux distro installers would make opting out the default option; no, I don't want to swap on my SSD. The last time I installed a distro, I still had to select the manual option for partitioning.

With an 8 Gig stick in my NUC, for normal desktop usage it never goes above 3.

And even then; they provision an absurd amount of it. I just did a fresh Ubuntu install. On a machine with 32 gigs ram, it creates a 32 gig swap partition by default!

They probably reason that you want your system to be able to hibernate, plus storage is cheap.

I have 8GB of swap for the 8GB in my laptop, for that reason.

On my desktop with 16GB, the w 2GB of swap it has is sometimes too little, and everything grinds to a halt.

32GB of SSD isn't that cheap!

A last-ditch safety buffer, to induce the slowdown so that you'll recognise that RAM is running low and hopefully prevent from actually completely running out.

By that time, my system is usually responding to simple keypresses with latencies >1min... :|

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