| Canonical's software engineer Dimitri John Ledkov recently announced that the upcoming Ubuntu Linux system installation will discard the Swap partition method and replace it with the swap file method. |
For most of us with SSD or NVMe flash drives and plenty of RAM, this isn't big news. However, it may be of interest to those who want to install a successor version of Ubuntu on a PC that is more than 10 years old.
Years ago, creating a Swap partition was mandatory when doing a fresh install of GNU/Linux, but that has changed as technology has advanced. Even the cheapest computers these days have at least 4G RAM, which is enough for office work and basic computing.
Nowadays, if your PC has 2GB to 4GB of physical memory, you don't need a Swap partition. Even if you create one, you probably won't need it at all, which is why Canonical decided to ditch the Swap partition for new installations of Ubuntu.
Canonical is currently developing Ubuntu 17.04, also known as Zesty Zapus, which is expected to be released on April 13, 2017.
"From 17.04 Zesty Zapus onwards, non-LVM installations will default to using a swap file instead of creating a Swap partition," said Dimitri John Ledkov. "Also, the size of the swap file can vary widely." Canonical ensures that users have full control over their installation by setting the parameter value to 0 if they don't want to use Swap. However, these changes do not apply to installing Ubuntu using the LVM option.
Changes will be made in Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) and later.