Theme 1: zram vs. zswap – users are shifting to zswap
- “I literally spent the better part of the weekend reading and learning all about the differences between zram and zswap and ultimately deciding to switch out my previous zram config for zswap on my NixOS system!” – eccgecko
- “I’ve had good luck using zswap+zstd on Ubuntu 26.04… I don’t really feel it’s necessary [to upgrade RAM] at this point.” – seabrookmx
Theme 2: Caution about swap files on COW filesystems (btrfs/zfs)
- “Swap files work, but I wouldn’t quite say ‘you are good to do swap files on btrfs’ because the official documentation … says swapfiles will have an amplified impact, much larger than the size of the swapfile itself.” – gucci-on-fleek
- “Right, you are good to do swap files on btrfs since linux 5.0 or so as long as you follow some rules.” – ciferkey
Theme 3: Positive experiences with zswap (often paired with tooling) on NixOS and other distros
- “I also just recently enabled zswap on my NixOS setup, it's been working fine… what really smoothed out the switch was using Claude Code to develop the NixOS configs.” – linsomniac
- “I have 32GB of RAM and 64GB of swap, so I really don’t need it, but it hasn’t hurt.” – linsomniac