Err, in my own experience, a heavily swapping machine generally always crashes X11 in the end, and is so unresponsive that one cannot get a command in sideways to help it beforehand.

Linux will kill processes to free memory when RAM+swap are full. You'll get to that point more quickly when using RAM+RAM than with the much slower RAM+swap anarchism.

And again, "lot's of swap" has through history usually meant no more than 1GB or so for most systems. And that was before Linux became entirely page based, allowing it to easily discard clean pages to free additional RAM on the fly. So just put 2GB of RAM in there and forget about it.

And embedded systems (eg. empeg) generally don't need or want swap, as it buggers their RT response and swapping to flash is generally a no-no.

Look at how well LiveCDs and the like work, entirely from RAM, with the added burden of having to store any modified files in that same RAM. No problemo usually, even on 512MB machines.

Cheers