You "found out" it relies on systemd and systemd is bloated? Which bloat exactly are you talking about?

I'm running Devuan + Enlightenment on an old chromebook with a 16g drive and 4g ram. It's perfectly usable for everything except big PWAs like Gmail.

I run Debian on a Thinkpad x120e. systemd bloat is basically a myth, and of all the things to work on reducing system resource use, it’s not quite last in line, but pretty close to it. In general systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success.

Devuan has the easy repos like Debian, it's a pretty straight forward fork, as is AntiX.

Void is great, but a bit more complicated, not LFS insane complicated but like Arch/Gentoo "Git good noob" complicated.

Really, any is good, and I'm looking at moving from Debian to AntiX.

Good choice, though...

Systemd is a mess, and the main guy is one of those obnoxious tech bro types who doesn't listen to anyone and slaps crap in for no reason aside from his own ego. Everyone should be moving away from it, for many reasons.

It seems like my Windows installation was using over 4 Gb of RAM to just do absolutely nothing. Now I can be doing multiple things with Arch and systemd and it's about 2.1 Gb unless I'm gaming or something. Do people using the older init functions actually perform even better? That would be wild! If so, I might need to grab a copy of Artix or try OpenBSD again. I had a Linux usage gap and just don't recall the resource pull from old init any longer. My first installation was on a machine with a Windows XP dual boot. I think it was an x32 processor rather than an x32-x64. You could run those on just 4 Gb. Maybe even 2.

Void + Mango has been my jam.

If your main goal is low resource use and fast, check out AntiX with Runit.

If you want system usages to be as low as possible you can skip a GUI all together, just use viu, mpv, w3m and such or you can look into projects like DSL (damn small Linux) and puppy Linux. If you're trying to maintain a mostly normal experience you can look into efficiencies in compiling your kernel and software a la Gentoo.

Does i3 do wayland?

Dwm or dwl

St or havoc with tmux for your terminal. Should be able to get under 8MB in usage.