I just got a new laptop and installed Linux on it. I mainly run OpenSUSE.
Getting full encryption on both was a bit of a challenge and I had no idea what I’m doing. Will having the swap partition in the middle break things? Did I really need so many partitions (Mint and OpenSUSE don’t show up in eachother’s boot menu)?
I’m probably not gonna change this layout (because reinstallation seems like a pain) unless the swap partition’s position is a problem. I’m just curious how many mistakes I made.
EDIT: I’m not upgrading my drive capacity. I do not need it.
You have swap, which is pointless in this day and age, and will just burn a hole in the flash and delay the OOM killer doing its work. Look at ntfsresize to shrink that Windows partition down to the minimum. Then maybe image the partitions and obliterate them from the SSD. Use LVM instead to give yourself future flexibility. 1TB NVMe SSDs are so cheap these days they might as well put them in boxes of cereal.
You can set the swappiness so that RAM gets filled before SWAP. You need it if your RAM isn’t large enough for the stuff you want to do. You also need it for Hibernation to be the same or larger size like your RAM. Without it you can only suspend. You MUST use encrypted SWAP if you want to be really secure since otherwise your encryption key might be written onto your Nvme.
The common misconception that swap is pointless stems from misunderstanding what it’s supposed to do. You shouldn’t be triggering the OOM killer frequently anyway. In the much more normal case where you’re only using some of your RAM for running applications, the rest is used as a filesystem cache/buffer. Having swap space available gives your OP the option to evict stale application memory from RAM rather than the filesystem cache when that would be the optimal choice to make.
This page explains it detail: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html