Fresh install of Parabola/GNU/Linux-Libre/OpenRC
On an Intel core2 laptop
boot into cli from OpenRC
$ free -h
used 60 MB
start xorg as root
# startx
# free -h
used 75 MB
That's much more reasonable. Goodbye systemd.
Once I have everything working I'm going to backup my desktop and nuke it. It has Intel ME so I'll put parabola Open RC base onto it with Xorg and use it with mpv and retroarch, for streaming and gaming. I'll use other alternative hardware for more important / less resource intensive activities. I like the memory usage from OpenBSD 6.3 more (27MB in cli after boot), and MS DOS 6.22 (348 KB) even more. Less things running in memory means a better chance of being clean.
I have a retail box of MS DOS 5 from the early 90s on 5.25" floppies, before the advent of the internet(its clean). MS DOS has no security, it's security is the physical security on my front door, but it's clean so that gives me privacy (unless I install malware); it's a pain to setup though, everything is manual configuration, that's the down side.