Does gaming create need for a bigger swap?
The swap is an extension of the RAM onto the disk, whose throughput is
something like 100 times smaller. When the RAM is full and the system swaps,
it is unbearably slow. As a consequence, the size of the swap for gaming is
irrelevant because you will not play on a system that swaps. You need enough
RAM for the game.
Since you are talking about desktop usages and since you never hibernate, the
swap needs not be large (1 or 2 GB maybe) because a desktop system that is
swapping is a pain to use.
You had better have a swap though. In this way, once the main memory is full,
the system swaps, you feel it, and you can close some applications/tabs.
Without a swap, the kernel would kill some process to free some space. That
is why the swap is essential on servers.
Anything else I should know or consider?
Having many partitions has a significant drawback: any of those partitions
can be full if it turns out to be under-dimensioned. For instance 2 GB for
/tmp would prevent you from using Popcorn Time. On the contrary,
over-dimensioned partitions are a waste of space. For instance 10 GB for /var
looks huge (I currently have 1.1 GB of files in /var).
If you use LVM, you can quite easily (after learning how to use LVM...)
resize your partitions. Without LVM, it is a pain to resize the partitions
without losing their files. Notice that some filesystems (I am looking at you
XFS) cannot be shrunk.
