I’d like to try right a stick for movement and mouse for looking, but with a full controller that doesn’t really work. And so far I haven’t sacrificed a controller to saw off the right side so it can rest on a table with a similar hand position as a mouse.
Have a look at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zram - a compressed block device in RAM that can be formatted as swap. There are various tools to set it up, maybe your distro already includes one of them. And htop has a meter for it, so you can see how effective the compression is (besides its own zramctl tool).