Ubuntu 17.04 says goodbye to swap partition

The next version Ubuntu 17.04 will arrive in April 2017 to add new features and polish a base for the next LTS that we will see in the same month of 2018. One of the biggest changes will be the removal of the traditional swap partition. or exchange to bet on a solution much more similar to the one present in Windows.

Ubuntu 17.04 changes the swap partition to swapfile

Swap is a small partition that has traditionally been used on Linux systems as virtual memory, a space that the computer uses in case RAM memory becomes scarce. Computers are becoming more powerful and have more RAM, so the swap partition is used less and less, not to mention its detrimental effects on solid state hard drives when writing data continuously and sustainably.

Ubuntu 17.04 will take another step forward and remove the swap partition in favor of another bet, the swapfile. The latter consists of a file that stores all the data that would otherwise end up in the swap partition, something that makes it much more dynamic and avoids the need to create a partition for something that we are hardly going to do. use.

At this point we have to ask ourselves if on our computers with 8 GB of RAM or more is it really necessary to use a swap swap partition on our GNU / Linux system. In the case of users with multiple distributions, it may be interesting to share the same swap partition instead of creating a swapfile for each of the systems.