Linux has ‘swap’. Pretty much it’s a back up to prevent your computer from crashing if it tries to use more ram than it has, so it allocates hard drive space to be used as ram.

Different distributions have different suggestions on how much space to allocate for swap. Depending on how much ram you’re putting in your machine and how you plan on using your machine will heavily influence the size of swap you need (ram intensive vs not ram intensive).

You can set up with a ‘swap file’ on a hard drive after you install your OS.
Or you can set up a ‘swap partition’ on your harddrive when you’re setting up your partitions prior to OS installation
Or you can set up a separate harddrive as a swap drive
Or if you have a lot of ram you can avoid setting up swap entirely. This is not advisable though, it sucks finding out something is ram intensive when what you’re doing crashes.

It’s good to have an idea of how you want to map out your hard drives before installing your OS.
The world is your oyster.

If you’re dual booting windows you need to turn off ‘safe boot’ in your BIOS.