Yeah, Gnome is far to bulky for my taste as well. I use Sway. It’s one single process. And it’s a Wayland compositor, so I don’t have any separate process for the X server. And Sway is currently using less than 90MB of RAM on my computer. With nothing else running but a minimal terminal emulator, htop, SystemD, and various daemons, my whole system is using less than 480MB of RAM.

And that all makes me happy, of course, but just seeing small numbers isn’t really the point either. Aside from resource usage, I spend less time fixing, fighting with, upgrading, configuring, and otherwise maintaining Sway than I would KDE or Gnome or XFCE, and more time using my computer for the stuff I want to do on it. (As an aside, Sway’s tiling model is absolutely baller. I rarely have to think about where I want my windows, and when I do have to think about that, I don’t have to go to the mouse to position/resize them.)

KDE and Gnome are two different varieties of seven(-hundred?)-layer bean dips of dependencies atop dependencies. I like that my entire graphical system is one process with comparatively few dependencies that I can wrap my head around pretty easily. (And, honestly, Sway is a step up in bulkiness/heaviness/complexity from dwm, which is what I used previously.)