why ubuntu LTS installs all in a single partition?

[Kent Borg]

RAM is relatively expensive, disk space is cheap. The folks who program 
kernel swap behavior are damn smart. Therefore, having some swap seems a 
good idea.  To a point.

One point: Applications might misbehave and gobble up lots of memory.  
Giving them lots of swap means they can go wrong longer and "worser" (if 
I may) before things break.  Wedging sooner seems good.  On this logic, 
a lot of lightly used servers might be better off with *less* real RAM.  
Maybe only 1GB instead of 2GB, maybe far less.

A contrasting point: Build it and they will use it.  A couple GB of real 
RAM seems a lot, until one starts to use it, at which point swap is a 
good addition.  For example, even with modest tasks, one way to use up 
more server is to run more copies of servers, in virtual machines, on 
fewer physical machines.  Virtual machines don't like to swap, but VMs 
are not always busy.  (Advice: don't put too many resources in one box, 
in case something were to fail. A pair of physical boxes, however, can 
scale up to one hell of a lot of redundant power.  Put them a few meters 
from each other and you can have some oops-a-tree-through-the-roof 
redundancy. too.)

I remember once having an argument with someone about whether we need 
faster computers.  He was adamant that I should just get a cup of coffee 
and not be so impatient.  I was perplexed and stammering along the lines 
that, with a faster computer I can do different and cooler stuff.  I 
would like to score that I was right: this was long ago, pre-"PC" days, 
before graphical user interfaces, before bit-mapped displays were 
common, before computers did audio, before telephones could crash or be 
rooted.  Being able to do more can be cool.  More RAM is more.  Swap 
makes RAM bigger--all seems good to me.  Swapping to rotating magnetic 
media is an old technology, but it is still shockingly relevant.

Unless you have a very well defined appliance with well defined resource 
requirements.  In that case, having the "right amount" is good, less is 
simpler, less takes less parts to build and less electricity to run 
generating less heat and noise and occupies less space.  Where are you 
on the continuum between appliance and general purpose computer?

Recently I have been playing around with image processing, driven from 
Python.  Python isn't crunching my pixels (that is what C is for, 
writing efficient libraries that I can then use at my leisure, from a 
civilized language).  This might not be a trivial usage.  One can always 
think up more elaborate ways to examine pixels, right?

Still, I bought the cheapest computer I could at a Microcenter, and it 
has two CPU cores, a 500GB hard disk and 2GB of RAM.  I gave it 8GB of 
swap.  Assuming that things are not going to spiral out of control (I'm 
not going to write code that crappy, am I?), it seems like good 
insurance against the future. I don't know what all I will use this 
computer for, computers are flexible, they are good at stuff I have 
never dreamed of.  Maybe I put more RAM in it someday (I don't know 
whether it can take more RAM...), maybe I do lots of things.  And 
without repartitioning the disk, I have some headroom here.  Yes, I 
could use a swap file, but I am not convinced that is as fast, and 
making sure it doesn't grow without bounds when something goes wrong is 
a concern, but partitions are simple hard boundaries I understand and 
trust without reading more man pages. There are other man pages I am 
currently interested in reading.

-kb