Realized  that -- due to weird behaviour[1] in the kernel -- I haven't
  been using any swapspace for months. My machine has "only" 1GB RAM but
  that's enough. In fact, I rarely use more than 512MB.

  This  makes  me feel good. :-) For me, 512MB still feels like a lot of
  memory but compared with modern PCs it's nothing. I heard that KDE may
  use 1.1GB right after startup...

  My setup (mainly awesome-wm[2]) uses about 90MB after startup. Firefox
  is the "killer" application and bumps memory usage up to about 250MB.

  ____________________

  1. https://bbs.archlinux.de/viewtopic.php?id=19598

  2. http://awesome.naquadah.org/