Comment by MomsAVoxell

Use swap for the important things: the part of your operating system at run time which doesn't get used much, but needs to be around when needed - the contents of /lib and /usr/lib and so on, all the *.so's and the things they allocate - shared libraries among the distro install, these things can be tidily swapped, until you need it.

If you need an application to always be responsive, start it with the swappable flag turned off, i.e. something like this:

    $ systemd-run --user --scope \
    -p MemorySwapMax=0 \
    -- /path/to/my/program arg1 arg2

Anyway, this is a distro-originated knob which every user must tweak for their use-case.