I used to do this as well, and tell Linux to never overcommit, but for a desktop system normal programs are not built for this scenario. Firefox will crash with 15% system ram usage because it requests a ton of virtual memory for each process on startup.

Swap can also be important if you want to get the most out of your ram because without swap, pages that are holding unimportant parts of the system can’t move out of the way for a large number of data pages that need processing. My latest memory revelation is zswap, which seems to be better than actual compressed memory. So far it’s served me well running ML loads on old hardware.

Windows hacking is just as fun as anything else, sometimes it’s even more rewarding just because you made it work on windows! My favorite is replacing the windows shell… Haven’t done that since 7 though :(