I updated from 16.3 to 17.2 and found it incredibly laggy and slow without even doing anything after booting. Zorin 16.3 was very fast. I tried everything to make it better like:
1- a clean install
2 - xorg instead of wayland
I am now back to Zorin 16.3 and I hope this gets fixed soon because I need at least Ubuntu 22.04 and a lot of users experienced this. I think most users wanted Zorin 17 to just use Ubuntu 22.04 without the extra stuff that probably made it slower (maybe like wayland or smth). I will probably try another distro like Pop!_OS but I really liked Zorin.
Have you checked the system monitor to see if there's something unusually active that may be causing the performance issue?
I would say is not necessarily bad. If you have enough RAM to carry out your everyday tasks, then using a swap partition only results in unnecessary reads/writes to the drive which, being unnecessary, is bad.
Even if you do need that extra safety net to avoid running out of memory, I would argue that there are better solutions these days, like ZRAM. That is, assuming that you can't upgrade the amount of physical memory for whatever reason.
