I hope you realize that using any flash-based medium as swap is going to greatly reduce its lifetime.

Not only that, but you want to have swap on the fastest medium available, so that slow downs due to hitting swap will not be further slowed down by using a slow medium.

Anyways, arguing about swap for a machine with >3GB of RAM for normal desktop use is kind of moot, in this use case it will hardly ever will swap.

Thanks Shadow

I would just do it!

If you get it a bit wrong the first time, you will learn and can quickly do a reinstall.
Choose any well-known distro.

Note that installing Linux is a matter of minutes - it's not like Windows which requires many hours to do.

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Gregg Bell,

My sentiments exactly.

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Ha ha. Thanks guys. I'm gonna do it. But now I have to explore the distros a bit. But that will be a new post (maybe.)Thanks for all the help.

I realize it, but my laptop has 2GB of RAM and doesn't swap much (yet). More so if I play with the swappiness value to not favor swapping. Plus I seem to have a few extra SDHC cards now that pi's and phones are tending towards the micro variant. And they're $10-ish to replace when it fails. I've been running linux off of an SDHC card for years now. But I do tend to replace them every six-ish months. I did have one sandisk SDHC card that went into read-only mode in under twelve hours, but most seem to fair alright. It is by no means a goto for server deployments, but for typical media streaming desktop usage it's fine. If you can afford to lose the contents of it at least once a year.

Try debian it'll run great on that machine & the installer is quite easy to use.

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