Comment by aktau

I still have some screenshots in my GitHub repository of what my ArchLinux with AwesomeWM (X11) looked like in 2009.

Those screenshots also contain the RSS, as luck would have it.

34MiB when on the desktop (clean), running X.org, AwesomeWM and xcompmgr (for compositing). Screenshot: https://github.com/aktau/awesome/blob/master/screenshots/200...

57MiB with a couple of applications open. From memory: urxvt running htop, thunar (XFCE file manager) and the Mirage image viewer (which is Python, not otherwise known for efficiency). Screenshot: https://github.com/aktau/awesome/blob/master/screenshots/200...

Nowadays, even with a tiling WM that's supposed to be lightweight (say: Sway), the minimum appears to be well over 300MiB (see https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1njecy5/wayland_comp...). GNOME 49 takes up around 1GiB last time I tried it (NixOS). Interestingly https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/oghner/how_does_the... from 5 years ago mentions Sway only using 115MiB. What happened?

Theories I have:

  - 32-bit to 64-bit means all points are double the size. That would account for something.
  - Wayland vs X11. I should compare Sway versus X.org+i3.
  - General library and system daemon bloat.