With a 16GiB RAM laptop I often use more memory than that which then ends up on swap (on zram)

With NUMA swap etc. also becomes a bit more complicated (see also https://blog.jcole.us/2010/09/28/mysql-swap-insanity-and-the... )

I think the main question here is to use a swap partition or a swap file.

The main problem of swap partitions is how inflexible they are, but lvm/btrfs/zfs make that less of an issue.

On Solaris a crashdump was written to swap when the system panicked. Not sure what Linux/BSD crashdump systems use nowadays.