I've dipped into swap due to virtual machines. It was extremely painful.
But the article mentions this in the conclusion:
> If you have some ancient hardware that you need to breathe new life into, or if you need to fit a distro on a modestly sized memory stick, the first thing you should look at is the window manager/desktop environment.
For me, it's a lot easier to drop Unity for XMonad than it would be to switch away from something like Chrome. If I actually want to do something with one of my old laptops, this might be relevant.
But the article mentions this in the conclusion:
> If you have some ancient hardware that you need to breathe new life into, or if you need to fit a distro on a modestly sized memory stick, the first thing you should look at is the window manager/desktop environment.
For me, it's a lot easier to drop Unity for XMonad than it would be to switch away from something like Chrome. If I actually want to do something with one of my old laptops, this might be relevant.