It is still possible to have a snappy computer experience. Go Linux, use a very configurable distro (Arch, Gentoo, NixOS), choose a lightweight DE and app ecosystem and it will get you there for the most part.

Browsers are still going to be the sticking point, but with agressive adblockers/noscript and hardware that's not terribly old (NVMe storage is priority 1), and you should be set.

But of course, snappiness isn't free and you have to spend some time doing first time set-ups and maintenance.

I’m on debian and using xfce.

The problem is the web browser.

I’ve got 16 gb of ram and the browser is using most of them. I can literally see the swap space emptying when i have (as in “im forced to”) sacrifice my browsing session (xkill the browser) due to constant swap out to disk.

And I’m using a pci gen 3 nvme disk, and already lowered swappiness.

The problem is the web browser.

Do you have an ad blocker, as mixedCase suggests?

At this point, my primary use case for ad blocking isn't the ad blocking itself, it is 1. the security of blocking ads, one of the worst vectors for attacks in the while and 2. the greatly reduced system resources my browser uses. The ad blocking itself is a further bonus.

I have 32GB RAM and Firefox is currently using 2.5% of that. I use ublock, noscript and Auto Tab Discard.

In my experience, changing swappiness makes everything worse and you end up back with the default value in the end.

Are you actually seeing degraded performance, or do you just have an aesthetic dislike of swapping?

I’m seeing literal freezes (can’t do anything, even mouse pointer is frozen). But if I kill the browser everything becomes snappy again.

I'd suggest again to try NoScript/Adblocking, disable hardware accel if you have it enabled, enable it if disabled.

If even there you have no success, I'd suggest you try something like EndeavorOS. Browsers have issues but that is not normal. You're not using Debian stable on the desktop, right?