When setting up a Linux distro using an installer in your favorite hypervisor of choice, you'll need to decide whether you wish to use a swap partition or a swap file for managing swap. Most installers will give you the option to use a swap partition. In my particular instance, I installed Debian 12 Bookworm, 64-bit using the AMD netinst (net installer). At some point in the installation setup process using the netinst ISO, I indicated that I wanted to have a separate partition for my $HOME  directory, but did not specify a swap partition.