Even though different Linux distros are often fairly close in terms of real-life performance and all of them have a clear advantage over Windows in many use cases, we can’t reject the fact that Arch Linux has undoubtedly won the competition. And now I’m so glad to have another reason to proudly say “I use Arch btw”
::: It was a joke of course :::
Zram is swap in ram. It uses fast compression to quickly compress memory instead of moving it to disk.
The disagreement here might be a semantic one. When people say “swap” they’re usually referring to the swap partition on disk, not just any memory that can be used to “spill” to.
What you are describing with zram serves a fundamentally different function from swap space. If the OS dumps its memory to swap, the PC can lose power and still recover. If it compresses LRU memory to zram, and loses power, it cannot recover.
Both are useful in low memory situations, but swap covers more than that. Most familiar with swap space would agree that its location on a nonvolatile disk rather than in volatile memory is critical to what makes it “swap” space.
“Some of the use cases include /tmp storage, use as swap disks, various caches under /var and maybe many more. :)”
