I plan to buy a new computer with an SSD and install Debian (latest stable: 10 buster). I'll keep user files on the traditional hard disk from my current PC (NTFS for access from windows apps running in a virtual machine).

I have read https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization which scares me a bit. If I just install to the SSD, and then create a RAM disk for /tmp, am I likely to run into any problems?

Is there an easy way to get notification if the machine starts to use /swap for anything other than hibernation? Or is swapping to SSD reasonably OK nowadays?

Many thanks for any reassurance you can give me, I haven't used Linux since I retired a few years ago, and a few things have changed.

don't make a swap partition and it won't use it
how much ram?
swap was created so things wouldn't crash due to no ram
if you have plenty of ram you shouldn't need swap

you could use zramswap, a compressed chunk of memory used as swap
but you can't use that for hibernation

hibernation, do you really need it?
if so, and you are keeping that old spinning drive in the pc,. you could have a swap partition on that.

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Don't worry, be happy.
I don't use Debian, but I can't believe they are still on the kernels listed in the article. As suggested, simply putting the swap on the hard disk should suffice. Most of the old horror stories (including write count) are of very little relevance with modern SSD. I don't bother changing anything on a "normal" home system - the filesystem/kernel defaults are getting better all the time. And yes, swap on SSD is fine too, so long as the activity rate is low - note activity rate, not necessarily total used.

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Thank you both. Firerat is probably right... if it boots fast from SSD I may not need to be able hibernate.

Reassurance having been gladly received, I will mark this LQ as solved.